How To Setup The Dev Env

• Introduction
• Common Dependencies
• Set Up the Torrust Tracker
• Set Up the Torrust Backend
• Set Up the Torrust Frontend
• Application Setup
• Development tools
• Conclusion

#Introduction

Before explaining how to setup the development environment, it’s important to understand how the Torrust Index works. The Torrust Index is composed of multiple services, each one with its own codebase and repository. The services are:

• A BitTorrent Tracker, which is responsible for tracking the torrents and providing the peers to the clients.
• The Backend, which is a REST API that provides the data to the frontend.
• And the Frontend, which is a webapp that displays the data to the user.

You do not need to setup all services to contribute to the Torrust Index, but in this article we will explain how to setup the full development environment, which includes all services. Sometimes you might want to contribute with a full feature that involves multiple services, so it’s useful to have the full development environment setup.

Setting up the development environment requires to setup the three main services.

First at all, we need to clone the repositories of the three services. We will clone them in a temporarily folder so you can follow this guide.

mkdir -p ~/Tmp/torrust
cd ~/Tmp/torrust
git clone git@github.com:torrust/torrust-tracker.git
git clone git@github.com:torrust/torrust-index-backend.git
git clone git@github.com:torrust/torrust-index-frontend.git

#Common Dependencies

If you are using SQLite3 as database driver for the Tracker or the Backend, you will need to install the following dependency:

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

#Set Up the Torrust Tracker

At the time of writing, the Torrust Tracker requires:

• rustc 1.72.0-nightly (839e9a6e1 2023-07-02)

You can run the Tracker with the following commands:

cd torrust-tracker/
./bin/install.sh
cargo run

The install script will generate:

• A ./config.toml file with the default values.
• An empty ./storage/database/data.db SQLite file for the database.

After running the Tracker with cargo run you should see the following output:

    Finished dev [optimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.06s
     Running `target/debug/torrust-tracker`
Loading configuration from config file ./config.toml
2023-07-11T11:35:30.413903013+01:00 [torrust_tracker::bootstrap::logging][INFO] logging initialized.
2023-07-11T11:35:30.414496649+01:00 [torrust_tracker::bootstrap::jobs::tracker_apis][INFO] Starting Torrust APIs server on: http://127.0.0.1:1212
2023-07-11T11:35:30.414590999+01:00 [torrust_tracker::bootstrap::jobs::tracker_apis][INFO] Torrust APIs server started

By default, only the API is enabled, if you want to enable the HTTP or UDP trackers, you need to change the enabled value in the ./config.toml file.

[[udp_trackers]]
enabled = true

[[http_trackers]]
enabled = true

Once the Tracker is running, you can test it trying to load an URL from the API. For example, you can try to get the Tracker statistics from the following URL:

http://127.0.0.1:1212/api/v1/stats?token=MyAccessToken

Notice we have used the default API token, which is MyAccessToken. You can change it in the ./config.toml file.

The response should be like this:

{
	"torrents": 0,
	"seeders": 0,
	"completed": 0,
	"leechers": 0,
	"tcp4_connections_handled": 0,
	"tcp4_announces_handled": 0,
	"tcp4_scrapes_handled": 0,
	"tcp6_connections_handled": 0,
	"tcp6_announces_handled": 0,
	"tcp6_scrapes_handled": 0,
	"udp4_connections_handled": 0,
	"udp4_announces_handled": 0,
	"udp4_scrapes_handled": 0,
	"udp6_connections_handled": 0,
	"udp6_announces_handled": 0,
	"udp6_scrapes_handled": 0
}

For more details about the Torrust Tracker, check the Tracker documentation.

#Set Up the Torrust Backend

At the time of writing, the Backend requires:

• rustc 1.72.0-nightly (839e9a6e1 2023-07-02)

To run the tests you will also need to install a command line tool to handle torrent files called imdl. You can install it with the following command:

cargo install imdl

You will also need to install a tool for database migrations if you are going to make changes to the database schema. We are using SQLx. You can install it with the following command:

cargo install sqlx-cli

If you are using SQLite3 as database driver, you will need to install the following dependency:

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

You can run the Tracker Backend with the following commands:

cd torrust-index-backend/
./bin/install.sh
TORRUST_IDX_BACK_CORS_PERMISSIVE=true cargo run

As you can see we are using the environment variable TORRUST_IDX_BACK_CORS_PERMISSIVE to enable a permissive CORS policy. The default port for the Backend is 3001 and for the web server serving the frontend application is 3000. Since they are different ports, we need to tell the backend to allow request from a different port so that the frontend can make request to the API. To know more about CORS, check the Mozilla CORS documentation.

After running the Backend with cargo run you should see the following output:

2023-07-11T11:54:17.553899587+01:00 [torrust_index_backend::web::api::server][INFO] Starting API server with net config: 0.0.0.0:3001 ...
2023-07-11T11:54:17.553946897+01:00 [torrust_index_backend::web::api::server][INFO] API server listening on http://0.0.0.0:3001

You should be able to load the API entrypoint on http://0.0.0.0:3001/

For more details about the Torrust Index Backend, check the Index Backend documentation.

#Set Up the Torrust Frontend

At the time of writing, the Frontend requires:

• Node: ^19.0.0

The frontend is a Nuxt application.

You can run the Tracker Frontend with the following commands:

cd torrust-index-frontend/
./bin/install.sh
npm run dev

You should see the following output:

Go to http://localhost:3000/torrents and you should see the torrent list page page:

For more details about the Torrust Index Frontend, check the Index Frontend documentation.

#Application Setup

There are some public pages like the torrent list or torrent details pages. But there are some pages that require authentication like the admin pages or the pages for uploading or editing torrents.

To access those pages you need to create an account. You can do it from the signup page:

http://localhost:3000/signup

#Development tools

We found some tools very useful to develop the Torrust Tracker and Index. We hope you find them useful too.

• DB Browser for SQLite: https://sqlitebrowser.org/
• BitTorrent client: qBittorrent https://www.qbittorrent.org/
• Torrent file editor: imdl https://github.com/casey/intermodal
• DaisyUI component library: https://daisyui.com/components/

#Conclusion

As you can see, the Torrust Tracker and Index are very easy to set up. We hope you find this guide useful. You might have problems:

• Setting up some of the projects on Windows. We are working on it.
• Or with some missing system dependencies.

If you have any questions or issues please open an issue on the corresponding repository:

• Torrust Tracker: https://github.com/torrust/torrust-tracker/issues
• Torrust Index Backend: https://github.com/torrust/torrust-index-backend/issues
• Torrust Index Frontend: https://github.com/torrust/torrust-index-frontend/issues

We very welcome any contributions to the project!