‘BitTorrent Trackers powered by PHP’
What an odd topic, I know. I found PHP used in a very interesting way. Torrenting; know I many will assume torrenting is mainly use to pirate. Why I chose BitTorrent Trackers as a topic is because I’m a heavy torrent user.
What does PHP have anything to do with these private trackers? Well, I’m very interested in the technical side of it. The trackers have mainly use these four elements: PHP, MySQL, HTML and some JavaScript. I was amazed at how these websites used these four languages in one to create a community in which users can share files via torrents. HTML output can be manipulated, information is queried from databases using MySQL and all compiled together using PHP.
It may sound little, but the technology behind this very intriguing. Firstly it starts with the PHP, echo or outputting the basic structures of the HTML. Then you need to fill it with data, using predefined variables that call/fetch information using MySQL. Make arrays, by calling one row and then assign them to a torrent. In a row of MySQL table, you would have the basic information of a torrent.
{ID}{Torrent’s Name}{Info Hash}{Description}{Category}{Upload Date}{Uploader}{Total Downloads}{Seeders}{Leechers}
There are many PHP powered BitTorrent Tracker software/source-code that can help you start one of your own.
- xbtit by Btiteam
- Article on TorrentFreak about ‘XBTIT: Bringing BitTorrent Tracker Ownership Within Reach’
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbttrkplus/
- https://github.com/JonnyJD/peertracker
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmybittorrent/
Here’s a video explaining what BitTorrent is: http://vimeo.com/15228767.
- Robert Phan
