About this project

WebTorrent Desktop is an open-source desktop application for streaming torrents on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It is designed around immediate playback: users can add torrent links or files and begin watching supported media while the download continues in the background. The project is maintained by the WebTorrent team and distributed as installers from the official website or GitHub releases, with Homebrew-Cask support on macOS. For developers, the repository contains the Electron-based application code and workflows for running, testing, and packaging the app. It can be started locally after cloning and installing dependencies, with a watch mode for automatic restarts during development. Testing includes linting and integration tests built around screenshot comparison using Spectron and Tape. Packaging scripts can produce builds for multiple platforms, including deb, rpm, zip, dmg, exe, and portable Windows output, with platform-specific notes for signing and dependencies such as Wine and Mono when building Windows packages from non-Windows systems. The README also documents the app’s privacy approach: it collects basic usage statistics to improve functionality, such as whether playback starts successfully or encounters codec issues, but states that it does not send personally identifying information or track which torrents users add. The project is licensed under MIT.