pyDC: the Python-based P2P file sharing client

Overview

pyDC is a P2P file sharing client for the Direct Connect network. It's written in Python, with only a minor part in C for performance reasons. It can run under many operating systems: Unix-like (Linux, *BSD, ...), Windows and Macintosh.

pyDC offers both a command line interface (for minimal memory impact) and a full GUI. The latter is build using the wxWindows library that is fully cross-platform and that makes use of platform native widgets.

Why Python?

I've chosen this language for three reasons:

being a VHLL (very high level language) one needs to write a far smaller number of lines of code compared to C/C++ or even Java;
it's platform independent;
since it's a scripting language, pyDC is by its nature scriptable. Any user can easily customize it, even at runtime (using the familiar Python interpreter).

A common mith about Python is that it's too slow for anything but small scripts. There's no doubt it shares the limitations of all interpreted languages; still pyDC is organized so that the biggest part of the execution time is spent inside modules and system calls (all written in C).

Prerequisites

First of all you need a recent Python intepreter (version 2.2 or higher).

If you plan to use only the command line pyDC version, this is enough: you can jump to the download section. Otherwise you'll also need:

wxWindows library for your platform (version 2.4.1 or higher): check here;
wxPython bindings: look here.

Downlaod

Latest version is 0.6; you can find it here.

Installation

After you've downloaded the compressed archive, just expand it inside a directory you like.

Note for Windows users: since the PATH environment variable is not updated by Python installer, you must set the full interpreter filename inside inter.bat and pyDC.bat. To do this automatically just run the setenv.exe utility.

Open the file settings.xml inside your favorite text editor and change it to fit your needs. Most of the tags are self-explaining, so I'll describe only the less obvious:

connection: possible values are: 56Kbps, Satellite, DSL, Cable, LAN(T1), LAN(T3);
sharesize: you can specify here how big (in bytes) your fake share will appear;
share: (by default commented out) contains one or more <dir>...</dir> block, each specifying a directory to be shared;
ip: force pyDC to report this IP to other clients (also useful when pyDC fails to automatically detect you IP);
port: pyDC will listen for all incoming connections (search results, file transfers) on the port you put here;
mode: possible values are: active, passive.

You're now ready to start pyDC. Run inter.sh (*nix) or inter.bat (Windows) for the command line interface; pyDC.sh or pyDC.bat for the GUI.

Feedback

If you discover a pyDC bug, please take the time to submit a report here.

For any question, suggestion or if you'd like to get involved in pyDC development, feel free to contact me at <aborder@users.sourceforge.net>.

And now happy sharing with pyDC ;-)

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