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node-torrent

BitTorrent in NodeJS. Only implements enough of the original 2001 spec to handle downloads.

Running:

git clone https://github.com/wadeAlexC/node-torrent

cd node-torrent

npm i

node index.js

By default, downloads a torrent of Debian 10.2.0. Use -t to specify an alternative torrent to download. Use -f to specify the name of the file to output once downloading is complete.

Debugging:

DEBUG=* node index.js

Current progress:

  • Decode bencoded torrent file
  • Calculate file infohash
  • Request peers from tracker
  • Establish TCP connection with peers
  • Perform handshake with peers
  • Receive bitfield from peers
  • Request pieces from peers
  • Download from peers
  • Write to file
  • Add CLI and output

How to explore this codebase:

For an intro into the BitTorrent protocol: https://blog.jse.li/posts/torrent/

The original spec: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html

Helpful alternate implementation in Node: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Hopefully code comments can help with the rest!

Start in index.js. From there, tracker.js sets up a connection with the tracker specified in the torrent file. After receiving peers from the tracker, download-manager.js takes over and does most of the heavy lifting.

download-manager manages the jobs assigned to all peers through a few queues:

  • unclaimed: Incomplete work that has not been assigned to a peer.
  • pending: Active jobs currently assigned to a peer.
  • unemployed: Peers that have not been assigned work.

Each time a peer completes a job, their active listing in pending is removed, and the peer is pushed to unemployed. When peers are pushed to unemployed, a listener calls download-manager._assignWork(). It iterates over each unemployed peer and assigns them work. Assignments come from unclaimed work, as we want peers to all be working on different jobs. But near the end of a download, we often don't have any unclaimed work to give to a peer. In this case, we assign peers work from pending. This means that many peers are downloading the same piece of the file, and helps ensure that no single, slow peer will throttle our download speed.

peer.js represents an active connection with a peer. download-manager initiates this connection in download-manager.addPeers(peers), by calling the peer constructor. The constructor initiates a TCP connection with the peer, then attempts to complete a BitTorrent handshake. From that point, each time the peer sends us data, peer._readAndProcessMessages is called. The function first expects the peer to send a bitfield, a structure that represents the indices of file pieces the peer can provide us. After that, the function handles a few types of messages:

  • UNCHOKE: The peer has unchoked us and we can start requesting data
  • CHOKE: The peer has choked us and we should not send more requests
  • HAVE: The peer is telling us they have some piece of the file, so we update the peer's bitfield to reflect this.
  • PIECE: The peer has sent us a part of a file piece. Pieces are downloaded in ~16KB chunks and collected in a buffer until the entire piece has been downloaded. Once this happens, peer._finalizeDownload() is called and download-manager will be prompted to add the peer back to unemployed.

As pieces of the file are downloaded, they are validated in download-manager by checking the hash of the downloaded piece against the piece hash specified in the original torrent file. If the hashes are a match, the downloaded piece is sent to piece-collector.js, which holds all of the downloaded pieces in memory until it has received a piece for each index of the file. At this point, it emits 'collection complete', signalling the download-manager to disconnect from all peers. Finally, it writes all the pieces to file in piece-collector.write().