The following instructions have been tried on multiple Debian systems and should work perfectly for you.

apt-get install subversion apache2 libapach2-mod-scgi php5 php5-cli php5-cgi php5-curl mktorrent unrar unzip php5-geoip curl libncurses5-dev pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libterm-readline-gnu-perl automake libapache2-mod-php5 php5-xmlrpc libtool

NOTE: If you have run an “apt-get install rtorrent”, you MUST run the following before installing from source or rtorrent will crash when you try to use rutorrent.

apt-get remove libxmlrpc-c3 rtorrent

Install XMLRPC (enables communication between rtorrent and rutorrent)

sudo mkdir /install cd /install sudo svn checkout http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xmlrpc-c/stable xmlrpc-c cd xmlrpc-c sudo ./configure sudo make sudo make install

Install Libtorrent

cd /install sudo wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/libtorrent-0.12.6.tar.gz sudo tar xzvf libtorrent-0.12.6.tar.gz cd libtorrent-0.12.6 sudo ./autogen.sh sudo ./configure sudo make sudo make install

Install rtorrent

sudo wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/rtorrent-0.8.6.tar.gz sudo tar xzvf rtorrent-0.8.6.tar.gz cd rtorrent-0.8.6 sudo ./autogen.sh sudo ./configure –with-xmlrpc-c sudo make sudo make install sudo ldconfig

**Configure config files so things talk to each other.
**
Add:

scgi_port = 127.0.0.1:5000

to your .rtorrent.rc file (should be in your home directory)

and Add

SCGIMount /RPC2 127.0.0.1:5000

to your /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default file (make it the very last line of the file)

Enable the scgi module for apache.

a2enmod scgi /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Install rutorrent:

cd /var/www svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rutorrent

(This will make an rutorrent folder with the latest code for rutorrent.

Install latest plugins

cd rutorrent rm -rf plugins/ svn co http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins chown -R www-data /var/www/rutorrent/

You should now be good to go. Make sure you start rtorrent in a screen session (or however you run it) and browse to rutorrent. Hopefully everything will work. If you have problems, check your config files.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.