Install uTorrent on Ubuntu and Debian

uTorrent is a very popular torrent client on Windows and Mac OSX. If you are considering moving your home media server and downloader to Linux (like Ubuntu or Debian) and feel comfortable with uTorrent, you can install what is called uTorrent server which provides a server daemon and web interface so you can access and manage your torrents. If one of the reasons you are using uTorrent is for the RSS feed functions, you will be missing that feature. You can however use Flexget for downloading from RSS feeds using other torrent clients. One more important thing, uTorrent server does not have any bloatware, ads, malware or bitcoin miners like uTorrent for other platforms. This guide works on Ubuntu and Debian based systems (Debian 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 officially) and includes an init.d script so uTorrent server for Linux autostarts on boot.

Install uTorrent on Ubuntu and Debian

Install OpenSSL which uTorrent requires to run

sudo apt-get install openssl -y

You may need the older version of libssl0.9.8 on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8 -y

For Debian users you can follow these insturctions for 32-bit

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openssl/libssl0.9.8_0.9.8o-4squeeze14_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i libssl0.9.8_0.9.8o-4squeeze14_i386.deb

or these for 64-bit

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openssl/libssl0.9.8_0.9.8o-4squeeze14_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libssl0.9.8_0.9.8o-4squeeze14_amd64.deb

Download the uTorrent server 3.0 release for Ubuntu and Debian based systems

wget http://download.utorrent.com/linux/utorrent-server-3.0-25053.tar.gz

Untar the utorrent package

tar -xvf utorrent-server-3.0-25053.tar.gz

Move the uTorrent package to a more appropriate installation location

sudo mv utorrent-server-v3_0 /opt/utorrent

Change ownership of the uTorrent package to prevent permission issues, change username to your username you use to log on

sudo chown -R username:username /opt/uTorrent

Enter the uTorrent folder

cd /opt/utorrent/

Run the uTorrent Server

./utserver

Browse to your uTorrent Server's Web GUI using its IP address http://ip.address:8080/gui

Default uTorrent Server username is admin and password is blank

Make uTorrent Server on Debian and Ubuntu Start on Boot

Download the uTorrent init.d script

wget https://raw.github.com/vortex-5/utorrent_initd/master/utorrent

Move the uTorrent script to the init.d folder

sudo mv utorrent /etc/init.d/utorrent

Adjust the user to run the uTorrent init.d script as

sudo nano /etc/init.d/utorrent

Change this line, replace htpcguides with your regular user

USER=htpcguides #any user account you can create the utorrent user if you like

Ctrl+X, Y and Enter to save

Make the uTorrent init.d script executable

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/utorrent

Update the uTorrent script to start at boot

sudo update-rc.d /etc/init.d/utorrent defaults

You can now start and stop the uTorrent server with these commands in the terminal

sudo service utorrent restart
sudo service utorrent stop

Reboot to make sure it all works

sudo reboot