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Hydra Wiki

Hydra is a self-hosted BitTorrent daemon built for scale and seeding: a Go control plane driving a purpose-built Rust engine ("Typhon"). It holds 100k+ torrents in a single instance, with a live SSE web UI, a native REST API, and a qBittorrent-compatible shim so your existing *arr / autobrr / cross-seed setup just works.

This wiki covers how to run it and the edge cases that aren't obvious from the README.

New here? Read Concepts first (5 minutes — the mental model), then go to Installation and First Run and shape it to your setup.

Understand

• Concepts — the three ideas behind Hydra: front vs agent, hoard vs race, how you talk to it.
• Architecture — the wiring: processes, sockets, persistence.

Install & set up

• Installation and First Run — Docker Compose, first boot, login, first torrent.
• Bare-metal Install — running without Docker.
• Windows install — the .exe path.
• Networking Modes — direct, SOCKS5 egress, PROXY-v2 relay, gluetun with hot port rebind.
• Gluetun (VPN) — the full recipe for running behind a VPN.
• Deployment Topologies — monolith, agent, front-only; sharding; which to pick.

Use day-to-day

• Categories and Routing — placement, strategy, and save-path per engine.
• Adding Torrents and Existing Data — download vs seed, skip_checking, and recheck of on-disk data.
• qBittorrent Shim and Automation — autobrr, Sonarr/Radarr, cross-seed.

Reference

• Configuration Reference — default.toml sections and the Config tab.
• Troubleshooting — the gotchas people actually hit.