Chihaya is a high-performance [BitTorrent tracker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker) written in the Go programming language. It is still heavily under development and the current `master` branch should probably not be used in production unless you know what you're doing.
Chihaya can be ran as a public or private tracker and is intended to coordinate with existing torrent-indexing web frameworks, such as [Gazelle], [Batter] and any others that spring up. Following the Unix way, it is built to perform one specific task: handling announces and scrapes. By cleanly separating the concerns between tracker and database, we can provide an interface that can be used by system that needs its functionality.
Make sure you have your `$GOPATH` set up correctly, and have `$GOPATH/bin` in your `$PATH`. If you're new to Go, an overview of the directory structure can be found [here](http://golang.org/doc/code.html).
Configuration is done in a JSON formatted file specified with the `-config` flag. An example configuration file can be found [here](https://github.com/chihaya/chihaya/blob/master/example.json).
Chihaya is designed to remain agnostic about the choice of data storage. Out of the box, we provide only the necessary drivers to run Chihaya in public mode ("memory" for tracker and "noop" for backend). If you're interested in creating a new driver, check out the section on [customizing Chihaya].
If you require more than the drivers provided out-of-the-box, you are free to create your own and then produce your own custom Chihaya binary. To create this binary, simply create your own main package, import your custom drivers, then call [`chihaya.Boot`] from main.
The [`tracker`] package contains 3 interfaces that are heavily inspired by the standard library's [`database/sql`] package. To write a new driver that will provide a storage mechanism for the fast moving data within the tracker, create your own new Go package that has an implementation of the [`tracker.Driver`], [`tracker.Pool`], and [`tracker.Conn`] interfaces. Within that package, you must also define an [`init()`] that calls [`tracker.Register`] registering your new driver. A great place to start is the documentation and source code of the [`memory`] driver to understand thread safety and basic driver design.
#### Backend Drivers
The [`backend`] package is meant to provide announce deltas to a slower and more consistent database, such as the one powering a torrent-indexing website. Implementing a backend driver is very similar to implementing a tracker driver: simply create a package that implements the [`backend.Driver`] and [`backend.Conn`] interfaces and calls [`backend.Register`] in it's [`init()`]. Please note that [`backend.Conn`] must be thread-safe.
