Torrengo: an alternative in GO to the abandoned Torrench

Several months ago one of our colleagues wrote here on the blog about Torrench which was a CLI tool (from the command line) with which your users could search for torrent files within some popular sites with the option of being able to download.

Unfortunately the project disappeared from GitHub with which no more is known about it except for some repository clones that some developers made in order to create launchers or versions in another format for this project.

But not all is lost, this time we will talk about an excellent alternative to Torrench which will serve us in a similar way, but with several improvements.

About Torrengo

The alternative that we are going to present to you today is Torrengo which is a command line program (CLI) written in the GO programming language that simultaneously searches for torrents (torrent files and magnet links) from various torrent websites.

Torrengo performs the search and download from various sources which the current supported are the following:

• https://archive.org
• all The Pirate Bay URLs located at https://proxybay.bz
• http://torrentdownloads.me
• http://1337x.to
• http://www.yggtorrent.gg

The user decides what sources he wants to search in Torrengo whether all sources are used in the search by default or only filter by certain sites.

Since The Pirate Bay URLs are changing quite frequently, this program simultaneously launches a search on all The Pirate Bay URLs found at https://proxybay.bz and retrieves the fastest response torrents (the returned url is also deeply checked because some proxies sometimes return a page with no error, but the page doesn't actually have any results)

Searching and downloading torrent files in torrentdownloads.me and yggtorrent.gg is protected by CloudflareTherefore this program eludes protection when responding to Cloudflare's Javascript challenges

Downloaded torrents can be launched in Deluge.

Torrengo is a fairly practical tool that can help you save a lot of time searching and downloading torrent files.

For example, if you want to find an ISO of a Linux distribution and save time searching (and even downloading) this tool is quite useful.

It is important to mention that the files shared on these pages, you can find both public domain content (legal) and files that have copyright, so the use of the tool and access to the aforementioned sites depend a lot on the Internet use and access policies of your country.

All that said, it is the sole responsibility of the end user for use.

How to install Torrengo in Ubuntu and derivatives?

For those who are interested in being able to install this tool on their system, They can do so by following the instructions we share below.

Since Torrentgo is an application written in GO it is necessary that we have the support for this programming language in our system.

We can add this by opening a terminal (You can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T) and in it you are going to type the following command:

wget -q https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/getgo/installer_linux

We give execution permissions with:

sudo chmod +x installer_linux

And we run the installer with:

./installer_linux

At the end we have to execute the following command:

source ~/.bash_profile

Already having GO support in our system, now we are going to download and install Torrengo. To do this in the terminal we are just going to type the following:

go get github.com/juliensalinas/torrengo

go build github.com/juliensalinas/torrengo

Basic use of Torrentgo

Once the application has been installed in our system, we can start using it, we just have to open the terminal and run the command "./Torrengo" + some keyword to search for a file.

For example, if you want to find the Ubuntu ISO:

./torrengo Ubuntu 18.10

This will return you all the results found on all the ordered websites and here it is up to you to decide which one to download from:

Also as mentioned you can decide to search only specific websites (let's say The Pirate Bay and Archive.org):

./torrengo -s tpb,arc Ubuntu 18.10

• arc (Archive.org)
• otts (1337x)
• td (torrentdownload)
• tpb (The Pirate Bay)
• ygg (Torrent Ygg)

If we want more records to be shown (verbose mode), just add -v.

./torrengo -s tpb,arc Ubuntu 18.10 -v