Compilation Alpine Linux

Alpine Linux build instructions

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.

Build dependencies

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

Application dependencies

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

Boost build files

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:

• https://github.com/boostorg/boost/tags

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

Libtorrent

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

qBittorrent

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

Run the binary

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

Post installation

Tidy up: Delete the downloaded build files and folders

cd && rm -rf qbittorrent libtorrent boost-dev ~/boost.tar.xz