Aiotorrent

Aiotorrent is an asynchronous, ultra-lightweight torrent library written in pure Python with support for unique features such as serving of files over HTTP without downloading to disk & more.
A comprehensive list of features supported by aiotorrent as of now are:

• Complete asyncio support
• Connecting to various types of torrent trackers (HTTP & UDP)
• Specifying an appropriate piece download strategy (default and sequential downloading)
• Downloading files to disk
• Serving files over HTTP without saving them to disk

Note

This library is still in active development and many additional features such as downloading files from a magnet link, resuming torrent downloads, etc are yet to (but soon will) be implemented.

Requirements

Tested on Python 3.11 but it should work on Python ^3.9 versions just fine.

1. Dependencies: The only 2 dependencies which are needed for aiotorrent to work are fast-bencode and bitstring.

2. Streaming dependencies: built-in support for streaming files over HTTP. To use this feature, you need to install extra streaming dependencies.

Installation

Install aiotorrent from PyPI using:

$ pip install python-aiotorrent

In order to use the streaming feature, you can install the dependencies using:

$ pip install python-aiotorrent[stream-support]

Quickstart

Initialisation

# Import the Torrent class and pass a torrent file to it:
from aiotorrent import Torrent
torrent = Torrent('path/to/file.torrent')

# To initialise the torrent, you need to call the init() coroutine.
await torrent.init()

Downloading & Streaming

Torrent files are stored inside Torrent.files as a list. We can access them by sub-scripting the Torrent.files attribute, like as follows:

Example to download and stream files

# To download the third file
await torrent.download(torrent.files[2])

Similarly, to serve a torrent file over HTTP, you can call the stream() coroutine, as follows:

# To stream the second file, etc
await torrent.stream(torrent.files[1])

This starts up a uvicorn server on localhost:8080 which uses starlette behind the scenes as the ASGI framework to stream files over http.

Piece downloading strategy

You can also change how pieces of a particular file are being downloaded. Currently, this library offers two download strategies:

• Default: This strategy is used when the strategy parameter is not specified to the Torrent.download() function. It downloads file pieces in a pseudo-sequential manner. For instance, it will start fetching pieces in order, but it may or may not yield the pieces in order.

• Sequential: This strategy is straight forward, and it always yields pieces in a sequential manner.

Important

The stream() coroutine always uses the SEQUENTIAL download strategy, and this behaviour cannot be changed.

from aiotorrent import DownloadStrategy
from aiotorrent import Torrent

torrent = Torrent("path/to/file.torrent")
file = torrent.files[1]

# The download strategies available are: DownloadStrategy.DEFAULT and DownloadStrategy.SEQUENTIAL
await torrent.download(file, strategy=DownloadStrategy.SEQUENTIAL)

The above methods can take additional parameters to customize the behaviour of this library. Read the documentation to know more.