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Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir

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394 points dahrkael | 2 comments | 19 Jun 25 22:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.428s | source

Hello everyone!

I'm currently in a journey to learn and improve my Elixir and Go skills (my daily job uses C++) and looking through my backlog for projects to take on I decided Elixir is the perfect language to write a highly-parallel BitTorrent tracker. So I have spent my free time these last 3 months writing one! Now I think it has enough features to present it to the world (and a docker image to give it a quick try).

I know some people see trackers as relics of the past now that DHT and PEX are common but I think they still serve a purpose in today's Internet (purely talking about public trackers). That said there is not a lot going on in terms of new developments since everyone just throws opentracker in a vps a calls it a day (honorable exceptions: aquatic and torrust).

I plan to continue development for the foreseeable future and add some (optional) esoteric features along the way so if anyone currently operates a tracker please give a try and enjoy the lack of crashes.

note: only swarm_printout.ex has been vibe coded, the rest has all been written by hand.

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voicedYoda ◴[20 Jun 25 02:57 UTC] No.44324351[source]▶
Well done. Couple quick notes, move to a logger instead of using IO.puts. Also consider adding OTel.
replies(2): >>44324394 #>>44324623 #
1. solid_fuel ◴[20 Jun 25 04:01 UTC] No.44324623[source]▶
I'll second this, just using the built in Logger [0] and Telemetry [1] applications would be fine, opentelemetry or anything else can be added to the telemetry hooks easily to export the metrics later.

[0] https://hexdocs.pm/logger/1.18.4/Logger.html [1] https://hexdocs.pm/telemetry/readme.html

replies(1): >>44325746 #
2. dahrkael ◴[20 Jun 25 08:42 UTC] No.44325746[source]▶
I use Logger through all the project except for the table pretty print. Telemetry is optionally available in prometheus and html formats: https://github.com/Dahrkael/ExTracker/tree/master/lib/ex_tra...