Download

You can find the BTManager project on the sourceforge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmanager/

News

I've decided to release a first alpha version of BTManager2, although some of the planned features are not implemented yet. This is for testing only, I don't think it's quite ready for day-to-day use, but what the hell :)

So, what's already implemented:

Most of BTManager1 features
Fancy progress bars :)
Hot restart: no more 'checking existing file', except in some cases
Most of the configuration is now tweakable from the Web UI
No more dependent on the official BitTorrent code; the protocol has been reimplemented from scratch. This means that some new cool features could finally be implemented easily, but it also means numerous bugs. Probably.
Scheduler: let the downloads only run at certain hours
Notifier: some events (start, stop, completion...) can be notified to the user, for now by e-mail, later on the desktop (Windows version), and maybe some others later (IM...).
Only 1 port is used, no matter how much downloads are running. This is good news for firewalled users :)
Basic RSS support
Some more...

On the way are: i18n (torrent names not in ASCII), a GUI, and whatever you'll come with :)

So, depending on your OS, you'll have to download:

The source tarball for Un*x users
BTManager-1.99.0-setup.exe for Windows users who have already installed Python, wxPython and pysqlite.
BTManager-1.99.0-full-setup.exe for Windows users who don't know what the preceding bullet means.

I expect some endianness problems for Mac users. Some of the code is in C and though I took care of it, I can't test it on a Mac...

Have fun.

Is it a bird ? Is it a plane ? No! It's some documentation, at last!

How it works

BTManager is composed of the following:

A server. This handles downloads and therefore must run permanently. It offers two services: first, it listens on port 8047 (default) for incoming HTTP connections, offering a Web-based interface to manage your downloads. Second, it listens on port 8100 (default) for incoming connections from the GUI.
A GUI written in wxPython. This component is completely independent from the server, so that exiting the GUI does not stop running downloads.
As for version 1.1.0, the GUI is discontinued. It will be back in a future release. Maybe.

Because of its client/server architecture, you're able to run the downloads on one machine on your network while browsing and adding downloads from another. To enable this, Unix users will have to edit /etc/mailcap to associate application/x-bittorrent MIME type to BTAdd.py. The Windows installer takes care of the association.

Installation

You must either copy all files in the BitTorrent directory or set the PYTHONPATH environment variable in order for BTManager to be able to find BitTorrent modules.

More detailed installation instructions, including dependencies, can be found on the documentation page.

Windows users should use the installer, which will take care of everything for them.

Screenshots

The impressive main process
The Web interface, under Mozilla Firebird, with the "gfx" theme.
The same with the "desert" theme.

Credo

Unlike many popular BitTorrent clients, BTManager is intended to be as non-intrusive as possible. Many others have hacked the BT sources to be able to deliver many bells & whistles, BTManager's functionnality base is just that of BT itself. So, if you're looking for a client that can tell you that the 8042nd byte has just been obtained from 155.36.55.4 at a transfer rate of 5.223336589 Kb/s, go away.