Chihaya

Chihaya is a high-performance 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.

Features include:

Low resource consumption, and fast, asynchronous request processing
Full IPv6 support, including handling for dual-stacked peers
Generic storage interfaces that are easily adapted to work with any database
Full compatibility with what exists of the BitTorrent spec
Extensive metrics for visibility into the tracker and swarm's performance
Ability to group peers in local subnets to reduce backbone contention

Using Chihaya

Chihaya can be ran as a public or private tracker and is intended to work 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. See below for more info.

Installing

Chihaya requires Go 1.3+ to build. To install the Chihaya server, run:

$ go get github.com/chihaya/chihaya/cmd/chihaya

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.

Configuring

Configuration is done in a JSON formatted file specified with the -config flag. An example configuration file can be found here.

Running the tests

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/chihaya/chihaya
$ go test -v ./...

Technical Details

See the wiki for a discussion of the design behind Chihaya.

Drivers

Chihaya is designed to remain agnostic about the choice of data store for an application, and it is straightforward to implement a new driver. However, there are a number of drivers that will be directly supported "out of the box":

Tracker:

memory
redis

Backend:

noop (for public trackers)
gazelle (mysql)

To use an external driver, make your own package and call it something like github.com/yourusername/chihaya. Then, import Chihaya like so:

package main

import (
	"github.com/chihaya/chihaya"

	_ "github.com/yourusername/chihaya-custom-backend" // Import any of your own drivers.
)

func main() {
	chihaya.Boot() // Start Chihaya normally.
}

Then, when you do go install github.com/yourusername/chihaya, your own drivers will be included in the binary.

Contributing

If you're interested in contributing, please contact us via IRC in #chihaya on freenode or post to the GitHub issue tracker. Please don't write massive patches with no prior communication, as it will most likely lead to confusion and time wasted for everyone. However, small unannounced fixes are always welcome!

And remember: good gophers always use gofmt!

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