Installing SABnzbd+, rtorrent, and rtgui on Ubuntu 9.04

SABnzbd+ is a web-based usenet binary downloader that eats NZB files.

Here are the paths we'll assume:

$ sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus

Edit /etc/default/sabnzbdplus and set:

• USER to your username (or the username that sabnzbd should run as).
• HOST to 0.0.0.0 (to allow remote access) or 127.0.0.1 (for local access only)
• PORT to the port number to listen on (e.g. 8001).

Then just go to http://yourserver:8001/sabnzbd to set it up. Don't forget to set:

• web credentials
• usenet server details
• paths (if your root is mounted on flash, you should also move the cache and logs to a hard disk)
• download permissions to 0755 if sharing downloads via Samba/NFS

rtorrent is a decent torrent client with a rubbish console interface. rtgui is a web front-end for rtorrent.

Here are the paths we'll assume:

$ sudo apt-get install php5 php5-xmlrpc libapache2-mod-scgi rtorrent

Copy rtorrent.rc to ~/.rtorrent.rc and edit as needed.

Start rtorrent:

$ rtorrent

It should come up without error, and you can press Ctrl+Q to exit. Now we'll set it to start automatically. Add the following to /etc/rc.local (replace <USERNAME> with your username):

sudo -H -u <USERNAME> screen -dmS rtorrent rtorrent

This will start rtorrent in a 'screen' session, which you can reconnect to with "screen -R rtorrent", if you wish. However, since the rtorrent interface blows infinitely, we'll install rtgui to manage it over the web.

Since that just starts it on reboot, start it now with:

$ screen -dmS rtorrent rtorrent

rtgui uses Simple CGI (SCGI) to control rtorrent. We have to do a few things to enable it. As root, edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default and add the following before </VirtualHost>:

LoadModule scgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_scgi.so
SCGIMount /RPC2 127.0.0.1:5000

If you want to use .htaccess files to apply a password to this, under "<Directory /var/www/>" change AllowOverride to All.

Restart Apache:

$ sudo service apache2 restart

Download rtgui from http://code.google.com/p/rtgui/downloads/list and extract:

$ sudo tar xzf ~/rtgui-x.x.x.tgz -C /var/www

Start with default config:

$ cd /var/www/rtgui/
$ sudo cp config.php.example config.php

Edit config.php. The only things you should need to change are $watchdir, $downloaddir, and $rtguiurl.

(You must have previously set AllowOverride to All in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default for this to work.)

If you want to require a password for rtgui:

$ cd /var/www/rtgui
$ htpasswd -c .htpasswd <username>
New password: <password>
Re-type new password: <password>

Then populate .htaccess with:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "rtgui"
AuthUserFile /var/www/rtgui/.htpasswd
require valid-user

If you want to have a single dropbox folder that works for both NZBs and torrents, we can make /x/dropbox do this. Download sort-dropbox.pl to your home directory or whereever. Then make it start as a service on boot by adding this to /etc/rc.local:

sudo -H -u <USERNAME> /path/to/sort-dropbox.pl -d &