Halite (named after the mineral) is a C++ BitTorrent client based on the excellent libtorrent library from Rasterbar Software. The program also relies heavily on the Boost libraries.

Download it from SourceForge.net

The current release is v 0.3.2 as of 11th November 2009.

Key Features.

While still at an early state of development Halite is a functional BitTorrent client. So far its list of features is pretty standard but that is because I want to ensure it does the basic stuff well. That said it supports:

• File selection and/or file priority specifications.
• Disk cache support.
• Trackerless torrents (using the Mainline kademlia DHT protocol).
• IP filtering with eMule style ipfilter.dat import.
• Protocol Encryption support.
• Translations of the UI into a number of languages through the help of volunteers.
  (if you wish to help with a translation then please do)
• Minimize to tray with transfer rate summary.
• Full Unicode support through UTF-8 and native Windows wide-char strings.
• Login support where tracker requires it.
• Ability to edit trackers specified in the torrent.
• Ability to create torrent files.
• Port randomisation and forwarding (UnPlug and Play or NAT-PMP).
• Transfer rate and connection limits both global and per-torrent.
• Shutdown scheduler.
• Fully compatible with UAC.

Planned in near future.

• Full proxy support.
• for a more detailed list and to suggest features see this forum thread…

Important note for people upgrading!

When installing through the MSI file download, Halite will make a registry entry pointing it to use the local Application Data directory for all configuration files. Users should manually copy any existing files from an older Halite version to that directory. The recommended files and folder to copy are:

Halite.xml
BitTorrent.xml
IPFilter.bin
DHTState.bin
resume/*
torrents/*

These changes were necessary to make Halite fully compatible with User Account Control. To revert to ‘portable mode’ whereby all configuration information will be saved alongside the executable simply delete that registry key- HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Halite/path. If you only ever used the standalone ‘zipped’ download then this will not be  necessary.

State of developent.

If you wish to keep up to date with the latest development work then you should check out the dev snapshots. People are encouraged to download and test it out but of course note they un-stable builds. Feature requests, bug reports or comments can all addressed on the support forum.

Sourcecode is available under the Boost Software License from SourceForge.net. Or if you can figure out Subversion the address is svn://svn.geekisp.com/halite.

See this post on the forum for details on compiling Halite yourself and report any issues you run into there. In addition you can check out the Trac site but I haven’t really done much with that… yet.

Screenshots.