A REST api for interacting with transmission, a command-line bittorrent client with a Python interface. Can be installed and run without root access.

Uses gevent to allow non-blocking serving of files, which can be streamed using HTTP Range requests.

It's convenient to run bittorrent on a remote server to take advantage of the bandwidth available in a typical data center. This API allows one to easily communicate with Transmission via web requests, for instance, to build an interface to access their torrents.

This app interacts both with Transmission and the filesystem to enable simple commands that unify common operations when working with torrents.

It also creates temporary links to files to securely allow access to files without opening up file browsing capabilities.

• GET /torrents - get all torrents
• POST /torrents - add a torrent with a magnet link
• GET /torrents/:name - get a torrent by name
• DELETE /torrents/:name - remove a torrent by name
• GET /files/:UID - get a download file from its UID

I found it surprisingly hard to locate good documentation on how to properly handle ranged HTTP requests. Here's a gist, and here is the implementation in this app.

1. A ranged request is performed with the Range header set to a value like bytes=x-y to specify the range of data requested.
2. The response status is set to 206 (Partial Content).
3. Content-Range response header is set to bytes x-y/z to indicate the first byte, last byte, and total size.
4. Accept-Range header is set to bytes.
5. Seek to the requested position in the file (specified by the first value in the Range header) and serve it (in this case in 1 MB chunks).