debtorrent

bittorrent proxy for downloading Debian packages

DebTorrent is a proxy for downloading Debian packages files with APT. It will download any needed packages from other DebTorrent peers in a bittorrent-like manner, and so reduce the strain on the Debian mirrors. The DebTorrent client runs as a daemon, automatically started on bootup, and listens for requests from APT for files. Any non-package files are downloaded and served to APT similarly to other proxying software (e.g. apt-proxy, apt-cacher, and approx). The configuration is very simple, and only involves prepending a server and port to your current sources.list files (similar to apt-cacher). When downloading package files, the DebTorrent client will try to use any other DebTorrent clients it can find to download from. This will use the uploading bandwidth of other peers, while reducing the demand on the Debian mirror network. However, if a package cannot be found on any peers, DebTorrent will fall back to downloading from a mirror to ensure all packages are downloaded.