Drench

Drench is a lightweight BitTorrent client written in Python. There are a couple of nice features, like the ability to download a subset of all the files in the torrent and exiting cleanly once the download is complete.

The client works with vis, a Twisted web server and D3.js visualization, to show what's going on in the user's file system while the download is taking place.

Install

The preferred way to install Drench is with pip, which will let you run the following command from the terminal:

pip install drench

Alternatively, you can clone the source and run the following:

python setup.py install

Use

From the command line enter the following:

python -m drench ./mytorrent.torrent --port 8000 --visualizer 127.0.0.1:8002 --directory ~/Downloads/

./mytorrent.torrent: The path to your torrent file (required)

--port 8000: The port to use for BitTorrent traffic (optional)

--directory ~/Downloads: Where to save your download (optional)

--visualizer 127.0.0.1:8002: The address of your vis server (optional)

Drench isn't capable of downloading multiple torrents at once; just start up a second instance in another terminal instead.

Status

You can use Drench to download torrent files from the small handful of sites I've tested on.

What doesn't work:

• Seeding
• Magnet links
• UDP-based handshake with tracker (which knocks out several of the biggest trackers)