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Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir

(github.com)
394 points dahrkael | 4 comments | 19 Jun 25 22:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | 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.

1. KomoD ◴[20 Jun 25 04:44 UTC] No.44324803[source]▶
I tried it, couldn't get HTTPS to work.

Also my console gets spammed with:

04:43:20.160 [warning] invalid 'event' parameter: size: 6 value: "paused"

but it seems to work. I would've liked to see HTTP stats too but I guess UDP is fine (though I have it disabled)

replies(2): >>44325719 #>>44325803 #
2. bill876 ◴[20 Jun 25 08:35 UTC] No.44325719[source]▶
The "paused" event is part of BEP 21. Clients send it to the tracker to let it know that the client is still incomplete, but won't download anymore. For example, because a user only wants some files from the torrent. Readme of the project shows that support for BEP 21 is not implemented.
replies(1): >>44327185 #
3. dahrkael ◴[20 Jun 25 08:56 UTC] No.44325803[source]▶
Telemetry for the HTTP side is in my ToDo list yes, since I'm using a 3rd party library for the webserver I still need to figure out how to do it right. For HTTPS to work you need to provide a valid certificate path in :https_keyfile but right now I would recommend sticking Caddy or Nginx in front of the tracker if you want HTTPS. I have certbot integration planned but is not a priority since most of the torrent peers use UDP.
4. KomoD ◴[20 Jun 25 12:45 UTC] No.44327185[source]▶
> Readme of the project shows that support for BEP 21 is not implemented.

Ah, missed that.