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Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir

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394 points dahrkael | 1 comments | 19 Jun 25 22:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | 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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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)

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1. 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.