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:

• Protocol-agnostic middleware
• HTTP and UDP frontends
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• YAML configuration
• Metrics via Prometheus

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 integration with the deployment of cloud software.

Production Use

Facebook

Facebook uses BitTorrent to deploy new versions of their software. In order to optimize the flow of traffic within their datacenters, Chihaya 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.

CoreOS

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 be sure that only their content is being shared by their tracker.

Development

Getting Started

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

$ go get -t -u github.com/chihaya/chihaya
$ go install github.com/chihaya/chihaya/cmd/chihaya

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.

Architecture

 +----------------------+
 |  BitTorrent Client   |<--------------+
 +----------------------+               |
             |                          |
             |                          |
             |                          |
+------------v--------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------+
|+----------------------+   +----------------------+frontend|                  chihaya|
||        Parser        |   |        Writer        |        |                         |
|+----------------------+   +----------------------+        |                         |
|            |                          ^                   |                         |
+------------+--------------------------+-------------------+                         |
+------------v--------------------------+-------------------+                         |
|+----------------------+   +----------------------+   logic|                         |
||  PreHook Middleware  |-->|  Response Generator  |<-------|-------------+           |
|+----------------------+   +----------------------+        |             |           |
|                                                           |             |           |
|+----------------------+                                   | +----------------------+|
|| PostHook Middleware  |-----------------------------------|>|       Storage        ||
|+----------------------+                                   | +----------------------+|
|                                                           |                         |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+

BitTorrent clients send Announce and Scrape requests to a Frontend. Frontends parse requests and write responses for the particular protocol they implement. The TrackerLogic interface to is used to generate responses for their requests and optionally perform a task after responding to a client. A configurable chain of PreHook and PostHook middleware is used to construct an instance of TrackerLogic. PreHooks are middleware that are executed before the response has been written. After all PreHooks have executed, any missing response fields that are required are filled by reading out of the configured implementation of the Storage interface. PostHooks are asynchronous tasks that occur after a response has been delivered to the client. Request data is written to the storage asynchronously in one of these PostHooks.

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++