qbittorrent.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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This; Linuxserver Qbittorrent docker with gluetun to make sure all traffic goes through your VPN.
I don't use docker, so I just set the interface to the tun0 or whatever in the qbittorrent config.
I use qBitorrent with no VPN because my ISP don't give a fuck of what I'm doing with their data
Where do you live?
SE Asia
KTorrent (KDE) or Transmission (GNOME).
GNOME is the default on Ubuntu, Fedora and more. KDE is default on OpenSUSE, KDE Neon and Kubuntu.
Just use qbittorrent
rtorrent for me.
Qbittorrent: you can bind the application with a network interface and ensure all the connexion will use your vpn.
bonus: you can use it as a server (without any graphical interface) and manage the torrent with your browser. This way, you can create a torrentbox on a dedicated computer.
Yes, this is what I do, with Private Internet Access (VPN). You can bind qbittorrent to PIA's interface, and also to its forwarding port.
Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.
Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.
And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.
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This is what I use. Once you get it working, it's a great setup. I have it running on my mini HTPC under the hood, and it really doesn't use much in the way of resources.
It has a webui that I can use to search and add torrents, and you can choose an alternate UI for the page if you want (I used VueTorrent, it looks better on mobile).
And, like others have said, you can bind it so that if your VPN disconnects, torrents won't just keep running in the background.
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Mullvad + Transmission
I torrent a lot on Linux and use Qbittorrent. Surfshark has a great VPN on Linux.
If you want to get into it then Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and nzb360 ($10) with Jellyfin is a great stack to manage your library but needs a bit of work to set up. You can then use the phone to download and search and watch it with an android TV app.
I had some issues setting it up with a ublue fedora immutable distro which are pretty non-existent on most standard distros.
Surfshark
Please don't use Surfshark
What's wrong with Surfshark?
I use qbittorent through Mullvad using Gluetun as qbt is running in docker.
DHT and PEX don't seem to work though, I did brief research and it seemed related to mullvad no longer allowing port forwarding? I don't know enough about how it works but I tried messing with it for several hours a couple days ago to no avail, only trackers appear to work for connecting to other peers.
On a headless Ubuntu LXC running in proxmox, I just access the qbt interface via its Web portal.
qBittorrent
I think it is even heavily used on Windows.
I use i2p for torrents exclusively. It's slow but totally private so I can seed without needing to mess about with a VPN.
There is a slightly smaller community but the people on there have similar tastes to me: linux textbooks, GOG games, jazz albums, etc.
Generally most people get recommended to start their Linux journey with Mint as it is noob friendly (while still having full functionality) other options to consider would be popOS Ubuntu & Fedora.
qBittorrent is the most recommended I've seen, although I use transmission.
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I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don't really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.
I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the "advanced" features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using for torrents.
Honestly, whatever floats your boat. There are many good options here, just try all and use the one you liked most. Or just go and pick one, or use the one that comes pre-installed in your distro.
Recommended ones:
- qbittorrent (my favourite as for many other in the comments)
- Transmission
- Deluge
- rtorrent (great if you run a headless server)
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Transmission. Simple, fast, efficient.
Mullvad all the way
Asus WRT Router > Proton VPN
^
ProxMox EV
^
Debian 12 Headless VM
^
Docker Compose
^
Docker Engine
- Unbound
- Pihole
- Prowlarr (for indexers)
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Lidarr
- Readarr
- 4 Instances of QBit for each ‘Arr
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr
- Traefik for SSL/TLS
- Homepage
Kind of a crude & simplified way of putting my setup but I think it gets the point across.
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I would also look in to I2P. Their are a few clients that support it like qbittorrent.
Anybody got a nix config for binding qbittorrent to mullvad easily?
There are 2 methods:
First method is to open preferences in qbit, under Advanced > Network interface, select "wg0-mullvad" from the drop-down menu. The interface might be named something different for you, but it should stand out as pretty obvious which one to select.
Other method is in qbit > Preferences > Connection, under "Proxy Server" select "SOCKS5" from the drop-down, input 10.64.0.1 as the host and 1080 as the port.
You could even do both these options at the same time if you like, there is absolutely no downside. It's like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
It’s like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
...I mean......
Ah, so, I should've been more clear, I have annoying requirements, I want qbittorrent to run through mullvad exclusively, and i want them to be intertwined and startup with eachother automatically. I don't want any of my other apps to be running in mullvad, is there a good way to do that? I think the socks5 proxy requires me to have it open and running, and thus everything would run through it, but maybe that wireguard method works around that? not sure, just wondering
I was in the same boat. I just want the VPN for my torrent client, without it impacting any other running applications/services. Try https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono, which uses network namespaces and has killswitch functionality.
As for Nix, I have no idea.
Wow, that's crazy. Could really get creative with your config using that!
That's actually perfect, thank you so much! I've been wanting to switch from nordvpn because it's ass but i got 3 years for basically free, gonna switch to mull with this as soon as that runs out, awesome!
If it was Windows, it would simply be a matter of configuring the Split-tunneling options in the mullvad app and it would work the way you want, but on to use the split tunneling feature in mullvad on linux is a bit clunky and doesn't remember your settings so it annoyingly needs you to manually whitelist each app everytime you load it up.
What I do is I run mullvad in a gluetun docker container on my nas and have the environment variable "HTTPPROXY=on" set.
Then, I connect apps on my desktop computer to gluetun by going into the network settings of whatever app I want to route through mullvad and set the proxy settings to "HTTP proxy" :8888. I use these proxy settings for things like FreeTube and one of the web browsers i have installed that I want to use only with a vpn.
This will work if you set the http proxy setting in qbit, but if you are going to the trouble of setting up docker, you may as well have qbit running in a docker container too.
Maybe the best option for you is to install docker (even if you don't have a server or nas, you can run it on your desktop), and run gluetun and qbit in docker containers, this will auto start on boot running headless in the background and the vpn wont interfere with the rest on you computer.
https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono seems like this is exactly what I want, actually, might help you if you're looking for a simpler solution! thanks for the advice anyway though!
If you need a daemon (to always run in the background, like on a server), use Deluge or Transmission.
If you just need a basic client that can live in your systray, qBittorrent.
You can torrent easily on Linux using any distro and any client.
It's very unlikely you'll have any issues.
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