How to Setup Deluge, A Torrent Seedbox Server

What is Deluge: Seedbox Server ?

Deluge is a popular multi-platform Bittorrent client. Therefore it is often used to provide torrenting / seedbox functionality on a Linux server. It is Supported by daemon-service, awesome interface, and great a plugin support.

This tutorial assumes that you have basic Linux knowledge on handling Linux shell. Above all you should have your own VPS server with root access. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account. If not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the beginning of commands to get root privileges.

To make the first connection to your VPS, refer my tutorial, “First Connection to your VPS“.

I will show you step-by-step to install, setup and using Deluge Bittorrent client as a seedbox server on Ubuntu 16.04 VPS. Same steps could be used for any other Debian/Ubuntu, but you may have to change the commands slightly, if necessary for RHEL/CentOS.

Install Deluge to your Server

First update system packages by issuing following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Use following commands to install Deluge daemon and web interface.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deluge-team/ppa
sudo apt install deluged deluge-webui

Note: If you face ‘add-apt-repository: command not found’? problem; use following command to fix it.

sudo apt install software-properties-common

Then create the Deluge user and group:

sudo adduser --system --group deluge

and add user root to the group deluge:

sudo gpasswd -a root deluge

Then you have to create a systemd service file for Deluge using your favorite text editor such as nano:

nano /etc/systemd/system/deluged.service

Add following lines:

[Unit]
Description=Deluge Bittorrent Client Daemon
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=deluge
Group=deluge
UMask=007

ExecStart=/usr/bin/deluged -d

Restart=on-failure

# Configures the time to wait before service is stopped forcefully.
TimeoutStopSec=300

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save and close the editor.

Now start and enable daemon using following commands:

systemctl start deluged
systemctl enable deluged

Next create a systemd service file for web interface:

nano /etc/systemd/system/deluge-web.service

And add following lines:

[Unit]
Description=Deluge Bittorrent Client Web Interface
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple

User=deluge
Group=deluge
UMask=027

ExecStart=/usr/bin/deluge-web

Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save and close the editor.

Now start and enable Deluge-web using following commands:

systemctl start deluge-web
systemctl enable deluge-web

Finally, you can access the WebUI by accessing http://YOUR-SERVER-IP:8112 by your favourite web browser. Note that the default password for the web interface is deluge. It’s better change it when you are first login.

Setup your Deluge Installation

First Connection to Deluge

In the first connection to Deluge web interface by providing default password “deluge“, it’ll ask you to change the default password.

On pressing “Yes”, you’ll be shown a new interface as follows.

Select the server and click on “Start Daemon”

When daemon started successfully, click on “Connect”.

And then you’ll be directed to Preferences > Interface. There you can change your deluge password.

Type a Strong password and press on “Change”. “OK” to the password successfully changed message. Finally “Apply” and “Ok” the changes done to preferences.

Changing the Default Download Location of Torrents

Click on Preferences:

Go to Downloads section and Add your desired download location to “Download to:” text box. For example, I am specifying /var/www/html/torrents as my download directory.

Finally “Apply” and “Ok” the changes done to preferences.

Note: The directory you are specifying as your download location should have full permission to access by deluge. You can either make Deluge as user/owner of that directory or chmod that directory to 777.

Installing Apache & Do Configuration to Access the Downloaded Torrents

Firstly, log into your server as root user.

Issue following command to install Apache web server to your VPS :

sudo apt-get install apache2

Create the directory “torrents” inside /var/www/html.

mkdir /var/www/html/torrents

Then make www-data as the owner of torrents/ folder.

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/torrents

Then chmod torrents/ folder to 777, so that it could be accessed by Deluge.

chmod 777 /var/www/html/torrents

Finally add user www-data to the group deluge and restart apache server.

sudo gpasswd -a www-data deluge
service apache2 restart

Use Deluge to Download Torrents

Go to web interface http://YOUR-SERVER-IP:8112

Click on “Add” button.

You can either add a torrent file or add a magnet URL. Hence in this example I am going to add a magnet URL.

Wait till the downloading reaches to 100%.

Finally you can access the downloaded torrent by visiting http://YOUR-SERVER-IP/torrents/

Let me know the problems you faced while following this tutorial in comment section. I am happy to help you 🙂