I'd like to serve a big file via Bittorrent. I'd like to do someapp serve <dir/file>, and get a magnetlink printed to share with people that are supposed to download it. I'd like to put it in a systemd unit-file on my server and be done with it.

I thought that what BitTorrent was supposed to do. But I must be be mistaken somewhere. I went through dozens of BitTorrent clients and they all seem rather unusable C++ projects from 15 years ago, half-abandoned, that can't seem to handle -h, and either expecting very inconvenient/arcane usage or just full GUI.

Then I found this project, and got super excited, because usually when stuff is in Rust, it's much better quality. And yes, at very least I understand the CLI, and there's a rqbit server start <dir> and -h is informative and I kind of understand how to use it. But I still don't see a serve <file> like functionality. Seems like I need to start a server, then call and rpc to download something, and maybe once it's downloaded, it will keep being seeded.

Is that something that is fundamentally impossible? Am I the first person ever that would want to put a someapp serve <file> in a systemd file to share out a chunky dataset for people to get, etc? Did BT and Linux sysadmin communities over >20 years never ever crosspolinated?

Isn't that something that would be a popular blogpost that gets on top of HackerNews? "Very easily share large files with XYZ". Very useful. Like magic-wormhole or sendme, but with DHT and swarming.