ruTorrent, rTorrent & seedbox

ruTorrent is the most popular web interface for rTorrent, which is possibly the most used BitTorrent client in Linux. It is mostly a web application, but it has its own backend that connects to rTorrent.

The term ‘RuTorrent’ is the combination of μTorrent and rTorrent. rTorrent is a text-oriented torrent client built on the Unix lib Torrent libraries whereas RuTorrent is a strong web front-end for the command line based torrent client “rTorrent”.

What is ruTorrent?

RuTorrent is a web UI interface for a torrent application, rTorrent. It helps you to connect, manage, remove torrents to your slot, monitor rTorrent settings, and do a lot of other things through its plugins. It is a highly powerful torrent application and has rich features.

In short:

rTorrent ⇒ The BitTorrent client, a console-based tool that also has an API to interact with it.

ruTorrent ⇒ A web interface for rTorrent that uses that API. It also does other things, for example, it can download torrents from an RSS feed. You configure RSS feeds in rutorrent's web interface, but there's also a backend service (written in PHP) that is part of rutorrent to do the actual download.

Thus, our Flutter application talks with ruTorrent's backend service to provide a native interface.

Seedbox

A seedbox is a dedicated BitTorrent server. Oftentimes they are rented out by companies called seedbox providers.

Seedboxes usually have a high speed Internet connection. This allows users to download torrents quickly and seed the torrents for a long time.

You can learn more about seedbox here.