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Private trackers

Torrents with the private flag (BEP 27) are fully supported. Add them from a .torrent file; magnets that resolve to private metadata are rejected.

What changes for private torrents

  • DHT and PEX are always off. Spill doesn’t advertise them in handshakes, doesn’t send DHT port messages, and refuses set dht=true or pex=true. The web interface disables those controls.
  • Peers come only from the torrent’s trackers (and its web seeds, if any).
  • Everything else, including rate limits, file selection and seeding goals, works the same as for public torrents.

Announces

Private trackers track your ratio from announces, so Spill is careful about them:

  • started is sent when a torrent starts; stopped when it is paused, removed or the daemon shuts down. Resuming starts a fresh session with counters at zero.
  • uploaded counts payload actually written to peer sockets; downloaded counts payload received, including data that later fails its hash check. Protocol overhead is not counted.
  • completed is sent once, when a download that had missing data finishes. Delivery is saved in the catalog (completed_announce in get: null = not completed here, false = waiting to be delivered, true = acknowledged), so it survives restarts and is not repeated. If a tracker accepts the event but its reply is lost, it may be sent again.
  • Torrents whose files were already complete when added (cross-seeding, moved data) announce as seeds and never send completed.
  • A tracker id from the tracker is sent back on later announces, and the tracker’s min interval is respected, including for reannounce.
  • Tracker errors are reported without the tracker URL, so passkeys don’t appear in error messages.

Tracker messages

  • A failure reason (“Unregistered torrent”, “Passkey not found”, …) is shown as the torrent’s last_error.
  • A warning message from a successful announce is shown as tracker_message.

Both appear in spill get and on the web page.

Client whitelists

Most private trackers only accept whitelisted clients. Spill identifies itself honestly, as peer ID prefix -sP0510- and Spill/VERSION, and never impersonates another client. Until a tracker whitelists Spill, its announces may be rejected with a failure reason saying so. Check your tracker’s rules before using Spill there.