Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir

The Bittorrent Tracker made in Elixir

👷‍♂️This project is a Work In Progress. While not ready for full industrial usage it does work.

There is a testing instance running at extracker.dahrkael.net:6969 with all current features enabled (Live statistics).

Features

Implementation Legend: 🔲 Not Yet 🔰 Partially ✅ Done ❌ Won't do

Important Features

• ✅ High performance (uses ALL the available cores, in-memory storage)
• ✅ Low memory usage (~200MB of RAM for each 1.000.000 peers)
• ✅ Zero setup (launch it and it just works)

Tracker-related BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals

Final and Active Process BEPs

Accepted BEPs

• ✅ BEP 15: UDP Tracker Protocol
• ✅ BEP 23: Tracker Returns Compact Peer Lists
• 🔲 BEP 27: Private Torrents

Draft BEPs

• ✅ BEP 7: IPv6 Tracker Extension
• 🔲 BEP 21: Extension for partial seeds
• ✅ BEP 24: Tracker Returns External IP
• 🔲 BEP 31: Tracker Failure Retry Extension
• ✅ BEP 41: UDP Tracker Protocol Extensions
• 🔰 BEP 48: Tracker Protocol Extension: Scrape
• ✅ BEP 52: The BitTorrent Protocol Specification v2

Deferred BEPs

• ❌ BEP 8: Tracker Peer Obfuscation

Other Features

• ✅ HTTPS support
• ✅ Database backups to disk
• ❌ WebTorrent
• 🔰 Infohash whitelist/blacklist
• 🔰 Peer management (interval enforcement, cleanup, banning, etc)
• 🔰 Metrics
• 🔰 GeoIP support (statistics, peer restrictions)
• Feel free to propose features in the Issues

Setup

There are 3 main ways of running ExTracker currently

Straight from source code

For this method to work you need to have Erlang and Elixir installed on your system

• Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/Dahrkael/ExTracker.git && cd ExTracker
• If needed, modify the configuration in config/runtime.exs to fit your needs
• run MIX_ENV=prod iex -S mix

From Releases

Currently there are no official releases built (soon™️). You can however make your own and deploy it where needed:

• Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/Dahrkael/ExTracker.git && cd ExTracker
• run MIX_ENV=prod mix release extracker for Linux or MIX_ENV=prod mix release extrackerw for Windows
• Find the release files inside the _build/prod/rel/extracker folder (if its a different machine make sure the OS and architecture is the same!)
• Copy the folder to its final destination
• If needed, modify the configuration in releases/{VERSION}/runtime.exs to fit your needs
• Run bin/extracker start

Docker

For this method you can directly run the available docker image: docker run ghcr.io/dahrkael/extracker:latest

or use it as part of docker-compose. Theres an example compose file available.

Note

Since modifying the runtime.exs file to tune the configuration inside the container is not easy you can also configure it using Environment Variables, see the example compose file for the complete list.

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) Dahrkael

Distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please refer to the LICENSE file in the repository root directory for details.