Chapter 5. Setting up BitTorrent Distribution with Chihaya

The Chihaya project is an open source BitTorrent tracker that supports JWT-based authorization. It is the preferred tracker for making use of the secure BitTorrent-based distribution feature in Red Hat Quay.

5.1. Basic BitTorrent Chihaya configuration

Copy the following file as chihaya.yaml, replacing {QE LOCATION} and {TRACKER LOCATION} with the reachable endpoint for the Quay instance and the tracker itself, respectively. 

chihaya:
  announce_interval: 15m
  prometheus_addr: 0.0.0.0:6880

  http:
    addr: 0.0.0.0:6881
    allow_ip_spoofing: true
    real_ip_header: X-Forwarded-For
    read_timeout: 5s
    write_timeout: 5s
    request_timeout: 5s

  storage:
    gc_interval: 14m
    peer_lifetime: 15m
    shards: 16
    max_numwant: 50

  prehooks:
  - name: jwt
    config:
      issuer: '{QE LOCATION}'
      audience: '{TRACKER LOCATION}/announce'
      jwk_set_url: '{QE LOCATION}/keys/services/quay/keys'
      jwk_set_update_interval: 5m

5.2. Running the Chihaya service

Run the following commands to start Chihaya under a Docker container with the specified configuration mounted, making sure to point the chihaya.yaml to the file created above. 

$ docker pull quay.io/jzelinskie/chihaya:v2.0.0-rc.1
$ docker run -p 6880-6882:6880-6882 \
  -v $PWD/chihaya.yaml:/etc/chihaya.yaml:ro \
  quay.io/jzelinskie/chihaya:v2.0.0-rc.1

5.3. Securing Chihaya

It is recommended to place the tracker behind an SSL-terminating proxy or load balancer of some kind, especially if publicly facing. If setup this way, make sure to update the jwtAudience value in the configuration to have https as its prefix, and to refer to the load balancer.

5.4. Making Chihaya Highly Available

High Availability of the tracker can be handled by running 2 or more instances of the tracker, with one setup as primary and another as secondary, configured with automatic failover. A simple HTTP check can be used to ensure the health of each instance.