How to install uTorrent on Ubuntu

uTorrent is a BitTorrent client used to download files from the BitTorrent network. It is one of the most popular BitTorrent clients, with over 150 million users worldwide. uTorrent is pretty lightweight in terms of size and resources usage, yet it offer both basic and advanced features like scheduling downloads, bandwidth throttling, and Mainline DHT (a decentralized trackerless network). uTorrent developed by BitTorrent and available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

In this article, we will show you how to install uTorrent on Ubuntu, specifically the latest version – Ubuntu 20.04. The guide is applicable to older versions of Ubuntu and many other Linux distro based on Ubuntu, such as Linux Mint or Pop! OS.

Install uTorrent on Ubuntu

Instead of a desktop application on Windows, we are going to install uTorrent as a server daemon and control it from a web-based interface on Linux. You can also use this method to remotely download torrents on another computer (firewall and port forwarding needed).

Step 1 : Download uTorrent tarball into your computer by running the following command.

wget http://download.ap.bittorrent.com/track/beta/endpoint/utserver/os/linux-x64-ubuntu-13-04 -O utserver.tar.gzCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Step 2 : Extract the contents of the file into /opt

sudo tar zxvf utserver.tar.gz -C /opt/

Step 3 : Give uTorrent binaries permission to execute by chmod the whole directory to 777. Remember to replace /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/ with the actual path to uTorrent in your scenario.

sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/

Step 4 : Create a symlink in /usr/bin/utserver which points to uTorrent binary in /opt, so that the system recognizes the utserver command. You may need to restart your computer after running the following command for things to take effect.

sudo ln -s /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/utserver /usr/bin/utserver

Step 5 : Install libssl-dev using apt by running the following command. libssl-dev is an uTorrent dependencies.

sudo apt install libssl-dev -y 

Step 6 : uTorrent still relies on the legacy libssl1.0.0 library, which is only available on Ubuntu 18.04 and lower. If this is the case, run the following command to install this depencies.

sudo apt install libssl1.0.0 -y Code language: CSS (css)

If you’re using Ubuntu version 19.04 or higher, you have to manually install libssl1.0.0 by running the following command.

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openssl1.0/libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.7_amd64.deb

sudo apt install ./libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.7_amd64.debCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Step 7 : Run uTorrent server with default settings. uTorrent can be configured to run on different ports, depending on your needs. The default port is 8080, but you can change this if needed. If you have another service running on port 8080, you will need to stop it temporarily in order for uTorrent to run. uTorrent will also use ports 10000 and 6881. The -daemon option will make uTorrent run in the background and keep it from interfering with other services.

utserver -settingspath /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/ -daemon

Step 8 : Access uTorrent web-based interface using a web browser of your choice by going to http://localhost:8080/gui. Please note that if you try to access http://localhost:8080/ (without the /gui path), you will encounter invalid request error. When being asked to log in, enter “admin” for the username and leave the password field blank.

If you’re installing uTorrent on a remote machine, you may need to open ports 8080 and 6881 on UFW. If you’re using UFW, you can do this by running the following two commands:

sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp
sudo ufw allow 6881/tcp

Execute uTorrent on Ubuntu startup

In order to start uTorrent Server on system startup, you have to create a systemd service for it. systemd is a Linux initialization system and service manager that includes features like on-demand starting of daemons, mount and automount, etc.

It’s best practice not to run uTorrent server as root, so we will run uTorrent server as the utorrent user in the same group, which should not have root privileges. First, you can create the utorrent system user and group with the following commands.

sudo adduser --system utorrent
sudo addgroup --system utorrent

Once the user and group has been created, we’ll need to add utorrent user to the utorrent group by running:

sudo adduser utorrent utorrent

Now we can proceed to create the actual systemd service for utorrent, run the following command to create a new utserver.service file. Feel free to change the filename to anything you want, as this name will be used to start and stop the service.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/utserver.service

Put the following text into the file. Note that since systemd manages uTorrent now, you can safely drop the -daemon option in the command.

[Unit]
Description=uTorrent Server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=utorrent
Group=utorrent
ExecStart=/usr/bin/utserver -settingspath /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/
ExecStop=/usr/bin/pkill utserver
Restart=always
SyslogIdentifier=uTorrent Server

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.targetCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

When you’re done, press Ctrl+O followed by Enter key to save the file. You also have to reload the new daemon contents by running the following command.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

After that, start the uTorrent service and enable auto-startup by running the following two commands.

sudo systemctl start utserver
sudo systemctl enable utserver

When creating the utorrent user, a home directory was also created at /home/utorrent/. You should specify uTorrent download path to be this directory, since the utorrent user has write permission in here, otherwise the uTorrent server running as utorrent user may encounter write access error. We also need to make utorrent as the owner of the /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/ directory by executing the following command.

sudo chown utorrent:utorrent /opt/utorrent-server-alpha-v3_3/ -R

We hope that the information above helped you successfully install uTorrent on your Ubuntu computer and set it up as a system service. We’ve also covered other software installation for Linux, such as How to install CMake, Airflow, Cura and ADB/fastboot on Ubuntu, in case you’re interested. If you have any suggestion, please feel free to leave a comment below.