Chihaya

Note: The master branch may be in an unstable or even broken state during development. Please use releases instead of the master branch in order to get stable binaries.

Chihaya is an open source BitTorrent tracker written in Go.

Differentiating features include:

• HTTP and UDP protocols
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Pre/Post middlware hooks
• YAML configuration
• Metrics via Prometheus
• High Availability via Redis
• Kubernetes deployment via Helm

Why Chihaya?

Chihaya is built for developers looking to integrate BitTorrent into a preexisting production environment. Chihaya's pluggable architecture and middleware framework offers a simple and flexible integration point that abstracts the BitTorrent tracker protocols. The most common use case for Chihaya is enabling peer-to-peer cloud software deployments.

Production Use

Facebook

Facebook uses BitTorrent to deploy new versions of their software. In order to optimize the flow of traffic within their datacenters, Facebook uses an alternative Storage driver for Chihaya that is configured to prefer peers within the same subnet. Because Facebook organizes their network such that server racks are allocated IP addresses in the same subnet, the vast majority of deployment traffic never impacts the congested areas of their network.

Red Hat

Quay is a container registry that offers the ability to download containers via BitTorrent in order to speed up large or geographically distant deployments. Announce URLs from Quay's torrent files contain a JWT in order to allow Chihaya to verify that an infohash was approved by the registry. By verifying the infohash, Quay can restrict their tracker to only sharing their own content.

Development

Contributing

Long-term discussion and bug reports are maintained via GitHub Issues. Code review is done via GitHub Pull Requests. Real-time discussion is done via freenode IRC.

For more information read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Getting Started

Building from HEAD

In order to compile the project, the latest stable version of Go and knowledge of a working Go environment are required.

$ git clone git@github.com:chihaya/chihaya.git
$ cd chihaya
$ GO111MODULE=on go build ./cmd/chihaya
$ ./chihaya --help

Docker

Docker containers are available for HEAD and stable releases.

Testing

The following will run all tests and benchmarks. Removing -bench will just run unit tests.

$ go test -bench $(go list ./...)

Related projects

• BitTorrent.org: a static website containing the BitTorrent spec and all BEPs
• OpenTracker: a popular BitTorrent tracker written in C
• Ocelot: a private BitTorrent tracker written in C++