opentracker — OctoWow launcher torrent swarm
BitTorrent tracker the launcher's webtorrent clients announce to. Runs on your VPS alongside the companion update server. Tiny (~2 MB RSS), near-zero CPU, zero disk IO after boot.
Why your own tracker: public trackers (opentrackr.org, etc.) are reliable enough for hobby swarms but add a single-point-of-failure you don't control, and often rate-limit new info-hashes. The launcher also announces over DHT, so your tracker is redundant with DHT — but it's the fastest path for a fresh peer to find the swarm before DHT has warmed up.
Deploy (VPS, Linux)
SSH into the VPS, clone this repo, run:
cd Tools/launcher/tracker
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh
install.sh is idempotent — re-run to update. It builds opentracker
from CVS (only distribution upstream offers), installs it under
/opt/opentracker/bin/, drops a hardened systemd unit, and starts the
service bound to 0.0.0.0:6969.
Firewall: open 6969/tcp + 6969/udp. On a typical Ubuntu VPS
with ufw: sudo ufw allow 6969.
Verify
sudo systemctl status opentracker
curl http://127.0.0.1:6969/stats?mode=tpbs # shows torrents / peers / bytes
The launcher's webtorrent client will announce to this URL the moment
a dev runs the companion server with TRACKER_URL set to match.
Wire the companion server to use this tracker
Set the TRACKER_URL env var when running the companion server so
every .torrent it generates announces to your VPS:
TRACKER_URL=http://<your-vps-ip>:6969/announce npm run server
Default is http://127.0.0.1:6969/announce (assumes tracker + companion
server run on the same VPS, which is the normal deployment).
Clients pull the .torrent blob from the companion server — the URL
is already baked in by create-torrent at generation time, so no
launcher-side config needed.
Uninstall
sudo systemctl stop opentracker
sudo systemctl disable opentracker
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/opentracker.service
sudo rm -rf /opt/opentracker
sudo userdel opentracker