This guide will help you install qBittorrent on Alpine Linux
Note
-
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
-
This guide will install qBittorrent and dependencies using shared libraries. At the point of writing this guide the latest version of Alpine is
3.20
-
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.
Important
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.
These are the build dependencies we need to install using apk
apk add build-base cmake curl git linux-headers ninja-build ninja-is-really-ninja python3 re2c tar xz
These are application dependencies we need to install using apk
Warning
If you are using a desktop and want the GUI for qBittorrent, you will need to append the dependency qt6-qtsvg-dev
to the command below
apk add icu-dev openssl-dev qt6-qtbase-dev qt6-qttools-dev zlib-dev
Tip
This command should provide the latest non beta release info from Github
curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/boostorg/boost/releases | jq -r 'map(.name | select(test("boost-[\\d\\.]+$"))) | first'
You can view all the tags for the boost Github repository here:
Download and extract the boost files.
Note
All we need to bootstrap boost is to download and extract the files. There is nothing to build at this step.
Bootstrap boost dev files
mkdir -p ~/boost-dev
curl -L https://github.com/boostorg/boost/releases/latest/download/boost-1.86.0-b2-nodocs.tar.xz -o ~/boost.tar.xz
tar xf ~/boost.tar.xz --strip-components=1 -C ~/boost-dev
Download and build libtorrent by checking out the RC_1_2
branch. You can also change the git checkout
command filter "v1*"
to "v2*"
to use the latest version of a specific tag
Tip
Any tag can be used to checkout the version you want - https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/tags
git clone --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git ~/libtorrent && cd ~/libtorrent
# git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname | awk '/v2/' | head -1)" # always checkout the latest release of libtorrent v2
git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname | awk '/v1/' | head -1)" # always checkout the latest release of libtorrent v1
cmake -Wno-dev -G Ninja -B build \
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=20 \
-D BOOST_INCLUDEDIR="$HOME/boost-dev/" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR="lib" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/usr/local"
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
Build and install qBittorrent
Tip
Any tag can be used to checkout the version you want - https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/tags
Warning
You are most likely not using a GUI (desktop) with Alpine, so remember we pass -D GUI=OFF
.
Removing -D GUI=OFF
will build the desktop version qbittorrent
instead of the cli qbittorrent-nox
qBittorrent v5 made Qt6 the default and removed support for Qt5 builds.
To manually set the Qt used for v4 or earlier you can used this cmake
option -D QT6=ON
or -D QT6=OFF
This command will build qBittorrent v5
with Libtorrent v1.2
using Qt6
, the defaults at the time of this guide.
git clone --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent.git ~/qbittorrent && cd ~/qbittorrent
git checkout "$(git tag -l --sort=-v:refname | awk '!/[0-9][a-zA-Z]/' | head -1)" # always checkout the latest release of qbittorrent
cmake -Wno-dev -G Ninja -B build \
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="release" \
-D CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=20 \
-D BOOST_INCLUDEDIR="$HOME/boost-dev/" \
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/usr/local" \
-D GUI=OFF
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
You can now run qbittorrent
or qbittorrent-nox
as it will be in the path.
Desktop version: -D GUI=ON
qbittorrent
cli version: -D GUI=OFF
qbittorrent-nox
Tidy up: Delete the downloaded build files and folders
cd && rm -rf qbittorrent libtorrent boost-dev ~/boost.tar.xz