Command Line Options

Running BiglyBT from the command line

Windows

Start a 'command prompt' by searching for and running 'cmd.exe'.

Change directory into wherever you have installed BiglyBT, usually

cd "C:\Program Files\BiglyBT"

or

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\BiglyBT"

Type in the following to try and run BiglyBT:

java -cp "BiglyBT.jar;commons-cli.jar;swt.jar" com.biglybt.ui.Main

If that reports an error regarding finding java then see if you have a Java runtime installed in either C:\Program Files\Java or C:\Program Files (x86)\Java, for example C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_231

If so then replace 'java' with a full path, in this example

"C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_231"\bin\java -cp "BiglyBT.jar;commons-cli.jar;swt.jar" com.biglybt.ui.Main

If you can't find a Java installation then you can go to http://java.com/ and install Java. Then repeat the above steps to locate the runtime and set the correct path.

Once you have that working you can save the command line into a batch file, say run.bat, and use that to start BiglyBT.

System Properties

System Properties are set by using the -D<name>=<value> JVM command line parameters. You can use 'biglybt.' in place of 'azureus.' in property names.

Some of the more useful ones are

• azureus.config.path: string - folder where BiglyBT configuration data is stored
• azureus.instance.port: integer - port used to communicate between instances
• MULTI_INSTANCE: boolean - allows multiple instances of BiglyBT to run when set to true

Making system properties permanent

Windows

If you want to continue to launch BiglyBT via BiglyBT.exe but supply some properties then you need to create and edit a file in %APPDATA%\BiglyBT called 'java.vmoptions'. Add a line for each property you want to set, for example

-DMULTI_INSTANCE=true

Running Multiple BiglyBT Instances

On Windows copy everything from wherever BiglyBT is installed (e.g. C:\Program Files\BiglyBT) into a separate folder - say "C:\BiglyBT2"

Then create a .bat file in this folder (say run.bat) with contents

java -cp "BiglyBT.jar;commons-cli.jar;swt.jar" -Djava.library.path="C:\BiglyBT2" -Duser.dir="C:\BiglyBT2" -Dazureus.config.path="C:\BiglyBT2" -DMULTI_INSTANCE=true com.biglybt.ui.Main

and run this.

If this doesn't work then open up a command prompt (run cmd.exe from the start menu), use the 'cd' command to switch into the folder where you've set things up (cd C:\BiglyBT2 in this example) and then run the .bat file directly. You should get some diagnostics indicating what went wrong. One thing to watch out for is spaces in the folder name - if you decided to name the folder "C:\BiglyBT 2" then you will need to ensure you have quotes around that wherever it appears in the command line.