FrostWire is a versatile software tool designed for downloading, streaming, and managing digital content from cloud services and BitTorrent sources. It combines the functionality of a cloud downloader, a BitTorrent client, and a media player into one seamless application.
Key Features:
Cloud Downloader: Directly download files and folders from popular cloud storage platforms.
BitTorrent Client: Efficiently download torrents with support for magnet links and trackerless downloads.
Media Player: Built-in support for playing audio and video files, eliminating the need for additional software.
File Sharing: Share files directly from your device or cloud storage with ease.
Integration with Online Services: Connect with platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, and more.
Offline Access: Download content to access offline, ensuring uninterrupted use even without an internet connection.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for casual users who want a simple way to access and enjoy digital content, as well as power users seeking flexibility across cloud and torrent sources. FrostWire enables seamless integration of downloading, streaming, managing, and sharing files in one place, saving time and effort for both personal and professional use.
FrostWire can be installed via winget, making it easy to set up on supported platforms.
Do not repeat yourself. (DRY) Re-use your own code and our code. It'll be faster to code, and easier to maintain.
If you want to help, the Issue tracker is a good place to take a look at.
Try to follow our coding style and formatting before submitting a patch.
All pull requests should come from a feature branch created on your git fork. We'll review your code and will only merge it to the master branch if it doesn't break the build. If you can include tests for your pull request you get extra bonus points ;)
When you submit a pull request try to explain what issue you're fixing in detail and how you're fixing in detail it so it's easier for us to read your patches. If it's too hard to explain what you're doing, you're probably making things more complex than they already are. Look and test your code well before submitting patches.
We prefer well named methods and code re-usability than a lot of comments. Code should be self-explanatory.
Make a Fork of the origin repo into your github account.
On your local copy, add your fork as a remote under your username as the remote alias.
cd frostwire
git remote add your_github_username_here https://github.com/your_github_username_here/frostwire
For further contributions
Create a branch with a descriptive name of the issue you are solving.
Make sure the name of your feature branch describes what you're trying to fix. If you don't know what to name it and there's an issue created for it, name your branch issue-233 (where 233 would be the number of the issue you're fixing).
Focus on your patch, do not waste time re-formatting code too much as it makes it hard
to review the actual fix. Good patches will be rejected if there's too much code formatting
noise, we are a very small team and we can't waste too much time reviewing if something
got lost or added in the middle of hundreds of lines that got shifted.
Code, Commit, Push, Code, Commit, Push, until the feature is fully implemented.
If you can add tests to demonstrate the issue and the fix, even better.
Submit a pull request that's as descriptive as possible. Adding (issue #233) to the commit message or in PR comments automatically references them on the issue tracker.
We'll code review you, maybe ask you for some more changes, and after we've tested it we'll merge your changes.
If your branch has taken a while to be accepted for merging into master, it's very likely that the master branch will have moved forward while you work. In this case, make sure to sync your master.
git fetch upstream master
and then rebase your branch to bring it up to speed so it can be merged properly (do not merge master into your branch):
git checkout my-branch
git rebase origin/master
As you do this you may have to fix any possible conflicts, just follow the instruction git gives you if this is your first time.
Make sure to squash any cosmetic commits into the body of your work so that we don't pollute the history.
Repeat and rinse, if you send enough patches to demonstrate you have a good
coding skills, we'll just give you commit access on the real repo and you will
be part of the development team.
Go inside the desktop directory and follow the build instructions in the README.md file.
Additional Desktop requirements
gettext
If you want to work with the translation (i18n) bundles, you will need to install gettext to perform the text extraction and bundling tasks (gradle gettextExtract, gradle gettextBundle)
If you are on Mac, gettext installation is very simple with brew:
brew install gettext.
If you are on Ubuntu, gettext installation can be done with
sudo apt install gettext.
Windows developers
If you are developing in Windows we recommend you work with MinGW and install the gettext package.
We also recommend you use git for window's terminal instead of cmd.exe. All of our scripts will work as if you were working in Linux/Mac. Git's terminal supports window resizing, more convenient copying and pasting, Tab text completion, Ctrl+R reverse search, common bash keyboard shortcuts and basic GNU tools right out of the box.
Android
Build with Android studio or go inside the android directory and type:
./gradlew assembleDebug, debug builds will be created inside the android/build folder.
IceBridge Distributed Search
FrostWire includes IceBridge, a standalone relay servent that provides reliable, authenticated, fragmented mesh transport between FrostWire peers for distributed search.
What it does
Enables peer-to-peer search without a central index server
Each FrostWire instance runs a local IceBridge daemon (in-process on desktop, separate JAR for testing)
Daemons communicate over rUDP (Reliable UDP) — a custom protocol built on Netty with Ed25519-authenticated handshakes, ACK/retransmission, and fragmentation/reassembly for payloads exceeding the UDP MTU
The desktop client talks to its local daemon over a localhost HTTP control API
Search requests are signed with the peer's Ed25519 key; responses are verified by the requester
On startup, IceBridge prints ICEBRIDGE_AUTH_TOKEN= to stdout. All control API endpoints (except /health) require this token in the X-IceBridge-Token header.
Control API endpoints
Endpoint
Method
Auth
Description
/health
GET
No
Health check ({"ok":true,"data":"ok"})
/register
POST
Yes
Ed25519-signed peer registration
/route
POST
Yes
Localhost-trusted peer routing (no signature required)
RELAY — Forwarding through forwarder peers (source identity verified)
Sessions are capped at 256 per daemon. Incoming search requests are rate-limited to 30 requests/minute per source.
File-level search
FrostWire indexes both torrent names and individual file paths within torrents using SQLite FTS5 with BM25 ranking. This means searching for "readme.txt" will find torrents containing that file even if the torrent name doesn't include "readme". Results that match on a file path surface the matched filename in the search results.
Identity management
Each FrostWire node has a cryptographic identity consisting of an Ed25519 keypair (signing) and an X25519 keypair (Diffie-Hellman). The identity's node ID is SHA-1(ed25519PubRaw) with a configurable proof-of-work difficulty (default 20 leading zero bits) to prevent Sybil attacks.
Identity generation uses jlibtorrent's native Ed25519 implementation for performance — the JDK's pure-Java Ed25519 is 50-100x slower on some platforms.
Identities can be backed up and restored using a BIP39 24-word mnemonic phrase (com.frostwire.crypto.Bip39Mnemonic). The 32-byte Ed25519 seed is encoded as a mnemonic with a SHA-256 checksum, enabling offline paper backup. IdentityKeys.fromSeed(seed) deterministically reconstructs the Ed25519 keypair from the mnemonic.
The desktop client exposes identity management via Options > Identity, showing the node ID, fingerprint, public key, difficulty, karma score, and shared torrent count, with buttons to show the seed phrase, restore from seed phrase, and export/import identity files.
