Notes to Self, Compiling Qbittorrent on a Raspberry Pi 5

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I wanted to always have the lastest stable version of qBittorent on my Pi.
So today, I sat down and followed the project’s excellent instructions and got it running.
I did however stray off the beaten path a teensy bit¹.
I didn’t want a gui and I wanted to be able to control it with systemd.

So here’s my checklist for next release. I’m currently running Bookworm on my Pi 5

1. In case you run into problems, compile instructions are here: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/Compilation-Debian,-Ubuntu,-and-derivatives

2. Do all off this after switching to root. (or sudo)

3. Install build tools
   sudo apt install build-essential cmake git ninja-build pkg-config libboost-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

4. Install Qt dependencies (qtbase5-private-dev is not part of the instructions, but compile will fail if you don’t include it)²
   sudo apt install --no-install-recommends qtbase5-dev qtbase5-private-dev qttools5-dev libqt5svg5-dev

5. Qt requires Python at runtime, so: sudo apt install python3

6. Install the libtorrent library. I compiled from source. Check page for fresh instructions, if stuff here doesn’t work

   git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git
   cd libtorrent
   git checkout RC_2_0 # or a 2.0.x tag
   cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
   cmake --build build -j4 # the -j4 is to do on four cores at once. my addition.
   sudo cmake --install build
   

   If you ever want to uninstall libtorrent, then don’t delete this main folder. The build process would have created a install_manifest.txt in the build folder. So you can then uninstall with: sudo xargs rm < install_manifest.txt

7. Get qb source: https://www.qbittorrent.org/download.

8. Unzip: tar xzvf qbittorrent-4.6.5.tar.gz and then cd qbittorrent-4.6.5/

9. Create Build configuration (disabled GUI and enabled systemd. Those aren’t part of the defaults)
   cmake -G "Ninja" -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DGUI=OFF -DSYSTEMD=ON

10. Build cmake --build build

11. Install all the files to their relevant locations cmake --install build

12. Install service to run for a specific user.

    systemctl daemon-reload
    systemctl enable qbittorrent-nox@<some-user>.service
    systemctl start qbittorrent-nox@<some-user>.service
    

13. We’re done.

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