Rivettracker Guide
by lindorez
RivetTracker is a PHP based tracker based on the PHPBTTracker (
http://dehacked.2y.net/BT/) which was written by "DeHackEd". It aims to provide a simplified interface and easy installation. The software is licensed under the GPL version 2 license and I would advise if you attend to use this software that you donate some funds to the author (
www.rivetcode.com).
RivetTracker will have you up and running in now time, however if you don’t know what a tracker is then please stop and look at our "What is a Tracker" post before continuing. There's no point installing the software if you don't know what it does.
Before installing the software you will require the following:
- A web server , I would recommend apache which is available on both windows and unix systems.
- PHP, I have tested it on both PHP4 and PHP5.
- A MySQL database, one of the most commonly used databases on the web which you will be able to find plenty of documentation.
I would recommend running the tracker from web hosting, whether that is shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server or anything which will be up and running 24/7. Otherwise people will not be able to access your files. It will also cause a strain on personal machines if there are a lot of users. I tested all of the web based software on my p2presource web server and the accounts are wiped after words.
Ok now we are ready to perform the install. First off we want to download the software. We can get the files from
http://www.rivetcode.com/software/rivettracker/ which is shown down the bottom, available in both zip and tar.gz.
The files must be extracted using something like WinRar. We now have access to the individual PHP files. If you have a dedicated server you can extract the file from within using when connected by SSH, however if you are running a dedicated server I am sure you will know what that means.
We now are required to copy the entire file contents into the web servers root folder or wherever on the server you wish the users to access the files. In this example I will use a folder called rivettracker within my www root. To connect to my webserver I often user FlashFXP, however you can use any FTP client of your choice. Simply copy all of the files onto your web server.
We now want to navigate using our web browser (I am using firefox) to our trackers location. If you have made a new folder named rivettracker on your web server then you would navigate to:
http://yourdomain/rivettracker/install.phpIn my instance its
www.p2presource.com/rivettracker/install.phpNow before continuing you have two choices. If you know your admin account name you can let the PHP script create the database with username and password for you. In my instance and the more likely instance, you will want to create your users and databases within your hosted control panel. Using these details we can now use the new database to install the software. I will therefore go for the first choice. I setup a database in MySQL named rivettracker with a given username and password.
- Database hostname: This is the location of the MySQL database, in general localhost will be the default unless its hosted on an external server. You would then put in that servers IP address.
- Username: The default user you setup for this database.
- Password: The password that you intend to use.
- Database name: This is the name that you decided to call your new database.
- Table Prefix: This will prefix ever table with the new given tab. This in general is a good idea if you have limited databases on your server and you can use an existing database and add in the new tables. In this example I prefixed all the tables with “rt_” which will make them all unique.
Now hit install and you are ready to go. If all went well you should get the configuration settings and a message displaying “Database was created successfully!”. If you get this then you are almost there.
The configuration setting should be quite self explanatory. There are a few required fields for username and password settings, however in general the defaults will be all that you require in the first instance. If you have strict permissions on your server you may get the following message:
In this case you must download the PHP file and then upload it back onto the FTP server into the root folder with the other RivetTracker files. You will want to set permissions of 766 on the RSS folder so that files can be written into the folder, you may wish to get your host to do this for you if you do not understand how to CHMOD a folder.
We can now go to our main URL and check that it is working:
http://yourdomain/rivettracker/index.php or in our test instance
http://www.p2presource.com/rivettracker/index.phpThis should look like the following:
Before we can use the tracker we need to generate a torrent and add the torrent to the tracker. Please visit the “How to make a torrent” (
http://www.p2presource.com/bittorrent/maketorrent.html) guide to find out how to do this. On attempting to add a torrent it will ask for a username and password that you entered earlier, enter this and continue. You will be prompted by the following screen:
You can now browse to the torrent file on your desktop and upload the torrent. After clicking the “Add Torrent to Database” button you should receive a successful added torrent message and your tracker is now good to go.
If you receive an error code 1 or error code 2 the chances are that you file post is not being generated correctly. The main reason for this is usually an incorrect setting in php.ini such as the temp directory not being set properly with the correct CHMOD or the file size being too large to upload.
Congratulations, your tracker is now setup. We hope you look at some more of our guides for more information.
P2P
