This guide will help you install qBittorrent on Alpine Linux using a combination of packages installed using apk
and dependencies built using cmake
.
ℹ️ This guide should work in any Alpine arch as long as the required packages dependencies are available to install for that arch. This guide was tested on x86_64
ℹ️ This guide will install qBittorrent and dependencies using shared libraries. At the point of writing this guide the latest version of Alpine is 3.13
The majority of these commands are copy and paste but some can be modified. For example, in the libtorrent section there is a choice between libtorrent v1
or v2
. Check the notes and commented commands for more information.
Check out the common information page to learn more about the available build configuration options for qBittorrent (for example, to compile qBittorrent without the GUI) and also CMake itself, if you're new to it.
These are the build dependencies we need to install using apk
apk add autoconf automake build-base cmake curl git libtool linux-headers perl pkgconf python3 python3-dev re2c tar
These are application dependencies we need to install using apk
ℹ️ The iconv
libraries needed for libtorrent
v1.2 are built into /usr/lib/libc.so
so we do not need to install iconv
as a dependency.
apk add icu-dev libexecinfo-dev openssl-dev qt5-qtbase-dev qt5-qttools-dev zlib-dev qt5-qtsvg-dev
apk
version for Alpine 3.12
or greater so we need to build it. It won't take long.
git clone --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja.git ~/ninja && cd ~/ninja
git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname "v*" | head -n 1)"
cmake -Wno-dev -B build \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/usr/local"
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
ℹ️ All we need to bootstrap boost is to download and extract the files. There is nothing to build at this step.
Download and extract the boost files.
curl -sNLk https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/release/1.76.0/source/boost_1_76_0.tar.gz -o "$HOME/boost_1_76_0.tar.gz"
tar xf "$HOME/boost_1_76_0.tar.gz" -C "$HOME"
Download and build libtorrent by checking out the RC_1_2
branch. You can also change the git checkout
command filter "v1*"
to "v2*"
to use the latest version of a specific tag
ℹ️ Any tag can be used to checkout the version you want - https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/tags
git clone --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git ~/libtorrent && cd ~/libtorrent
# git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname "v2*" | head -n 1)" # always checkout the latest release of libtorrent v2
git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname "v1*" | head -n 1)" # always checkout the latest release of libtorrent v1
cmake -Wno-dev -G Ninja -B build \
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
-D BOOST_INCLUDEDIR="$HOME/boost_1_76_0/" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR="lib" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/usr/local"
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
Build and install qBittorrent
ℹ️ Any tag can be used to checkout the version you want - https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/tags
-D GUI=OFF
.
git clone --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent.git ~/qbittorrent && cd ~/qbittorrent
git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname | head -n 1)" # always checkout the latest release of qbittorrent
cmake -Wno-dev -G Ninja -B build \
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="release" \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
-D BOOST_INCLUDEDIR="$HOME/boost_1_76_0/" \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_LIBRARIES="/usr/lib/libexecinfo.so" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/usr/local"
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
Tidy up the downloaded build files
cd && rm -rf qbittorrent libtorrent ninja boost_1_76_0 boost_1_76_0.tar.gz
You can now run qbittorrent-no
as it will be in the path (or qbittorrent
, if you build with the GUI).
qbittorrent-nox