How To Install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WebTorrent Desktop is a free, open-source streaming torrent application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. With WebTorrent Desktop, you can watch videos from the Internet Archive, listen to music from Creative Commons, or audiobooks from Librivox.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation WebTorrent Desktop on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

WebTorrent Desktop Features

• Lightweight, fast torrent app
• Beautiful user experience
• Free, non-commercial, ad-free, and open source
• Instantly stream video and audio
  • WebTorrent fetches file pieces from the network on-demand for instant playback.
  • Even when the file isn’t fully downloaded, seeking still works.
    (Seeking just reprioritizes which pieces are fetched from the network.)
• Stream videos to AirPlay, Chromecast, and DLNA
• Based on the most popular and comprehensive torrent package in Node.js, web torrent
• Full-featured, but bloat-free
  • Opens magnet links and .torrent files
  • Drag-and-drop makes adding or creating torrents easy
  • Discovers peers via tracker servers, DHT (Distributed Hash Table), and peer exchange
  • Supports the WebTorrent protocol for connecting to WebRTC peers (i.e. web browsers)

Install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing WebTorrent Desktop.

First, download the deb package from the Github project page and run the following commands to install WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu systems:

sudo apt-get install gdebi
wget https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-desktop/releases/download/v0.18.0/webtorrent-desktop_0.18.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo gdebi webtorrent-desktop_0.18.0-1_amd64.deb

Step 3. Accessing WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu.

Once installed, WebTorrent Desktop can be started from Unity Dash or your preferred app launcher or from the terminal:

webtorrent-desktop

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WebTorrent Desktop. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WebTorrent Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WebTorrent website.