An easy to install PHP based BitTorrent tracker for WordPress 1.2.1

Credits:

All the real credit goes to Dehacked for his PHPBTTracker. All I’ve really done is lift his code, change a few table names and stick it all in a wrapper to try and make life easier for WordPress users.

Installation:

WPBT tries to make installation as easy as possible for WordPress users. It uses the WordPress database for storage and user system for control access.

Installation of Tracker:
1. Create a directory to contain the relevant files beneath your WordPress installation. Ex. /wordpress/tracker
2. Place the files in WPBT-xxx.tgz in that directory.
3. Login to WordPress with a user with at least level 8.
4. Load the directory you made in your browser. Ex. http://www.yoursite.com/wordpress/tracker/
5. Click where indicated to install the trackers tables into your database

Assuming all is well, you now have a BitTorrent tracker. The control panel will only function if a WordPress user has a level of at least 8. To change the required user level, look at the second line of index.php file source.

Hosting files with BitTorrent and WPBT:
For users to be able to get what you have tracked the original source files need to be seeded. This is only a general outline, there are a lot of different options for seeding files.

1. Create a .torrent file for the files you wish to host. I’ve been using MakeTorrent 2.0. You will need the URL of your tracker. It is listed on the Add Torrent page of the adminstration panel.
2. Using the Add Torrent page of the WPBT Administration panel. Browse to the file using the browse button and click Create.
3. Seed the file in a BitTorrent client. In the official BitTorrent client this involves running the .torrent file and then selecting the location of your original source files as the destination directory. The client will verify the files are already complete and begin to seed. For more industrial seeding I use TorrentFlux but it is beyond the scope of this document.

4. Place the .torrent file you made on the web and link it for users to download. Ex. http://www.yoursite.com/myfile.torrent

Advanced Tweaking:
There are many options in the config.php file. I have added several lines to the end to adapt the WordPress configuration to PHPBTTracker. To really understand everything going on I recommend downloading PHPBTTracker and its documentation.

Cravats:
WPBT does not require any modification to the WordPress files, but it does add three tables permanently to the database and dynamically adds two more per torrent being tracked.

Download
WPBT v0.5.

As always, use at your own risk. This software should be considered experimental.