Headless Vuze in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

[boonleng]

Vuze 4.2.0.8 won't work in headless mode. You need 4.2.0.9 beta.

There are some instructions on how to get Vuze (formerly Azureus) started headlessly, i.e., without a GUI, but they are scattered all over the internet. So I thought I would share my experience on how to get it working under Mac OS X Snow Leopard with the essentials documented here.

I assume that you are familiar with command line tools, like copy, make symbolic links, etc. After all, most people seeking for headless Vuze are somewhat of a UNIX guru... 😉

So, what you need:
Vuze v4.2.0.8 from Vuze's official page
The latest beta core Azureus4209-B04.jar, log4j.jar & commons-cli.jar from Vuze jar snapshot

The way I applied it in Terminal:

cd /Applications/Vuze.app/Contents/Resources/Java/
mv Azureus2.jar Azureus.jar.backgup
mv ~/Downloads/Azureus4209-B04.jar .
mv ~/Downloads/log4j.jar .
mv ~/Downloads/commons-cli.jar .
ln -s Azureus4209-B04.jar Azureus2.jar

After doing that, the files should look like

lrwxr-xr-x  1 501  80        19 Sep  5 08:54 Azureus2.jar -> Azureus4209-B04.jar
-rw-rw-rw-  1 501  80  13460090 Sep  2 11:17 Azureus2.jar.backup
-rw-r--r--  1 501  80  13634000 Sep  4 12:10 Azureus4209-B04.jar
-rw-r--r--  1 501  20     30117 Jul 24  2008 commons-cli.jar
drwxrwxrwx  3 501  80       102 Sep  2 20:01 dll
-rw-r--r--  1 501  20    352668 Jul 24  2008 log4j.jar
-rwxrwxrwx  1 501  80   1929968 Jul 23 15:09 swt.jar
-rwxrwxrwx  1 501  80         0 Jun 22 19:45 swt.jar.nopack

(Optional but recommended) Install Azureus HTML WebUI plugin, download it from azhtmlwebui

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/Vuze/plugins/azhtmlwebui
mv ~/Downloads/azhtmlwebui_0.7.6.jar ~/Library/Application\ Support/Vuze/plugins/azhtmlwebui/

You'll need to set up a user account for telnet access. Don't worry too much about the security, the telnet access is only allowed from 127.0.0.1. So we launch Vuze in console mode.

java -XstartOnFirstThread -Dazureus.install.path="/Applications/Vuze.app/" -Dazureus.config.path="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Vuze/" -Duser.dir="/Applications/" -Dazureus.console.multiuser=1 -jar /Applications/Vuze.app/Contents/Resources/Java/Azureus2.jar --ui=console

Once started, in the Vuze console, get into telnet mode and create the user account.

ui telnet
user add -u [username] -t Admin -p [password]

e.g.,

user add -u vuze -t Admin -p torrent

Then, you can exit Vuze using the command 'quit'.

Finally, to start Vuze in headless mode in the background, in Terminal, do

java -XstartOnFirstThread -Dazureus.install.path="/Applications/Vuze.app/" -Dazureus.config.path="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Vuze/" -Duser.dir="/Applications/" -Dazureus.console.multiuser=1 -jar /Applications/Vuze.app/Contents/Resources/Java/Azureus2.jar --ui=telnet > /dev/null &

You may close this terminal.

Once started, you should be able to telnet in from other Terminal.

telnet 127.0.0.1 57006

If you installed azhtmlui, you can use Safari to check the torrent status by going to http://localhost:6886

Hmm... the post has been longer than I anticipated. Anyway, hope this will help someone out there. Thanks for reading.