Most Bittorrent trackers today comes with functions that not everyone may need, such as torrent indexing software, forums and ratio management. Bitstorm tries to implement the very basic tracker protocol in a simple and easy way. It has no forums, no login requirement and no other bloat. It is easy to configure and install on any web server that supports the PHP scripting language.
Please note that Bitstorm wasn't meant to be run on high-traffic sites that receives 10+ announces per second. If you expect to have more than 1000 peers, consider using some other software. This is a limitation of using text file databases. (There is a MySQL version of Bitstorm, see below.)
The installation process is pretty straightforward on any operative system. Start by grabbing the source code and copy it into your web root. Fire up the text editor of your choice and edit the configuration parameters in the beginning of the file. If your web server is running on Linux, you don't really need to edit anything, the tracker should work right out of the box. If you are using anything else you may need to change the file path of the peer database.
Congratulations! You are now running your very own Bittorrent tracker.
Add http://ck3r.org/tracker/ as your announce URL and give Bitstorm a try. This server also supports encrypted announces with TLS/HTTPS on port 443.
At this moment there are 7064 peers connected to the ck3r.org server. This tracker has become popular on public bittorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay. To keep up with the pressure of tracking several thousand peers, Bitstorm has been rewritten with MySQL support. The MySQL version is not available for download as it is still in alpha stage. If you want to be brave and give it a try just send me an email and I'll send back the latest revision of the code. During benchmarking Bitstorm served ~140 announces per second using the MySQL version of the code on an Atom 1.6 GHz processor with 1 GiB of RAM.
Bitstorm was written with security in mind. The code has been reviewed many times by several experienced programmers. It also supports the announce key extension which prevents peers from updating each others records.
Bitstorm is released under GPLv3 (or at your opinion, any later version). You may read the full license here.
Bitstorm is written and maintained by Peter Caprioli. You can find my contact details here.