If you ever ran eMule or MLDonkey back in the day, this will feel familiar — but it's built from scratch in Rust on modern infrastructure.
rucio is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing app. No trackers, no central servers, no relay nodes for the actual data. Peers find each other and the files through a Kademlia DHT (plus mDNS on the local network), keyword search rides on Gossipsub, and bytes move directly between peers.
I started it partly out of nostalgia and partly because I wanted a P2P stack I actually understood end to end — discovery, transfer, NAT handling, the lot — instead of a black box. It grew into something I now use daily, so I'm putting it out there.
What it does today:
- Fully decentralized — Kademlia DHT over the internet, mDNS on the LAN, no infrastructure to run (though you can run a bootstrap node if you want one).
- Web control panel — manage shares, searches and downloads from the browser. It's served by the daemon itself (Leptos/WASM), no extra process.
- Command-line client — a scriptable
rucioCLI for everything, locally or against a remote daemon. - Magnet links — share any file with a single
rucio:<hash>link, generated entirely offline if you like. - Resumable downloads — interrupted transfers pick up where they left off after a restart.
- Directory sharing — point it at a folder and every file inside gets indexed, hashed and announced automatically.
- NAT-friendly — HighID/LowID-style handling so peers behind NAT can still download; publicly reachable nodes serve chunks to everyone.
- Single binary — the same
ruciobinary is the daemon (ruciod) and the CLI depending on how you invoke it.
The eMule/Kad bridge (the fun part): rucio can optionally talk to the eMule Kad2 network. That means you can search Kad and download ed2k:// links right alongside native rucio transfers. It's opt-in (a build feature), but it's there because a chunk of those old files are still out there and still moving.
Some screenshots:
Try it (container):
docker run -d --name rucio \
-e RUCIOD_API_LISTEN=0.0.0.0:3003 \
-e RUCIOD_UPNP=false \
-v rucio-data:/var/lib/rucio \
-p 4321:4321/tcp \
-p 3003:3003/tcp \
-p 4662:4662/tcp \
-p 4672:4672/udp \
ghcr.io/ogarcia/rucio:latest
Then open http://localhost:3003/. There are slimmer image flavors too — latest-headless (daemon only), latest-cli (standalone client), and latest-bootstrap (a DHT bootstrap node). Pre-built binaries for Linux and macOS (x86_64 + aarch64) are on the releases page as well.
Note: If you download the precompiled binary from releases, when you extract it, create a symbolic link from ruciod to rucio, and run ruciod for the daemon and rucio for the CLI.
Honest caveats (it's early):
- I work with AI, so I’m not going to lie to you—there’s some vibe coding involved. I review and go over what I’ve done, but I want to be honest. If you don’t like it, just skip this app.
- This is v0.1.0, pre-1.0 — expect breaking changes (DB schema, API, config) between releases. I'll happily break things to get them right.
- There is no built-in authentication. If you expose the daemon beyond your own machine, put it behind a reverse proxy with auth (the docs have an nginx + basic-auth example). Keep the API port private otherwise.
- It's the work of one person so far. Rough edges exist.
Links:
- Source: https://github.com/ogarcia/rucio
- Containers:
ghcr.io/ogarcia/rucio - License: GPL-3.0