[libtorrent] tracker URL authentication

[Thomas Vincent-S. <tho...@gm...>]

Hello,

Firstly, thanks for that amazing tool that is libtorrent. :) One has to
love OSS.

I am trying to integrate a torrenting feature in one of my projects, and am
using a private tracker which would need authentication of the peers
connecting to it. There is a torrent_handle function: set_tracker_login
which supposedly does what I want, but it doesn't seem to work when I use
it.

I have modified a PHP tracker (PHPBTTracker) to handle authentication, but
even when I set the tracker login on the torrent handle, the headers are
not filled with the Authorization: Basic <Base64 encoded> information.

Anyway, I would prefer to use URL authentication (having an HTTP URL
containing  ?username=user&password=pass ) instead, and libtorrent doesn't
support that although I found a TODO in the code that would seem to
indicate that the feature is/was thought of?

*http_tracker_connection.cpp:*
93: // TODO: 0 support authentication (i.e. user name and password) in the
URL

Is this type of authentication indeed a missing feature in libtorrent, or
am I missing something there?

I might have to rework my design to allow for a different way to
authenticate with the tracker (based on IP address for instance) but I
would prefer to avoid that if possible.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best regards,
Thomas