BitTorrent Trackers have the role to coordinate the communication or file transfer (peer to peer) between users. Practically, with a torrent tracker, the BitTorrent files and files that will be shared, you will be able to have a torrent file download website.

The existing torrents can be easily added to any website. In order to share certain files through peer-to-peer technology, new torrents must be created and hosted. There is the possibility to use an open public tracker or to install one on your own web server, because if you have a web hosting account on a shared server the account could be suspended or canceled and all website data will be lost.

PHPBTTracker+ is a free (GPL licensed) PHP BitTorrent tracker that uses a single MySQL database. It can be used on an Apache web server having support for PHP. In case of Windows operating system, WAMP server is the most convenient to install Apache/PHP/MySQL distribution.

After you unpack the PHPBTTracker+ archive in a new folder in www directory, various operations must be performed to finalize the tracker installation. The files index_sample.php and retired_sample.php must be renamed to index.php and retired.php and copied from the directory index_sample to the main PHPBTTracker+ directory.

In the web browser address the install.php file must be specified. From the available installation options, choose the second one, if you have administration rights for the MySQL server. The script will automatically create the database tables and a config.php file containing the database connection details. In this file, the line $admin_user=" "; and $admin_pass=" "; allows you to define the administrator username and password necessary to access the tracker backend.

In order to finalize the installation, the files index.php and retired.php from the main PHPBTTracker+ directory must be edited too. In both files you must look for the lines require_once (" /version.php"); and respectively require_once ("/config.php"); and specify the full path for version.php and config.php files.

After this step the PHPBTTracker+ installation is complete. The tracker supports various customizations, widely described in script comments. If you want to test PHPBTTracker+ capabilities, it can be downloaded from here.