HACK: How to change the location of your FrostWire settings folder

This post is for advanced users who might not be happy with the default location of the FrostWire configuration folder (as of this generation of frostwire it’s called “.frostwire5” and it resides somewhere on your home folder since FrostWire will create it the first time it runs)

Maybe you don’t like folders on your home folder, maybe you keep all your configuration folders elsewhere, maybe you want to install FrostWire and keep it running on a external drive or USB stick, we’ve coded this just for you.

the “.meta” file

You will need to create a new file called “.meta” and place it next to your FrostWire executable wherever it may be.

For Windows users, this has to be on the same folder as in FrostWire.exe exists.

For Mac users, this will be inside “FrostWire.app/Contents/MacOS/” wherever your FrostWire.app may be.

For Linux users, this will be wherever your frostwire.sh and frostwire.jar files may be, in Ubuntu the default location is /usr/share/frostwire

Here’s an example of how that might look for an external drive:

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#FrostWire .meta configuration file example (works only after FrostWire 5.6.3)
#meta settings for windows
user.settings.dir.windows=e:\configurations\.frostwire5.windows
user.settings.root_folder.windows=e:\Downloads

#meta settings for mac osx
user.settings.dir.mac=/Volumes/MyExternalDriveName/configurations/.frostwire5.mac
user.settings.root_folder.mac=/Volumes/MyExternalDriveName/Downloads

#meta settings for linux/unix
user.settings.dir.posix=/media/MyExternalDriveName/configurations/.frostwire5.posix
user.settings.root_folder.posix=/media/MyExternalDriveName/Downloads

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NOTICE 1: Notice how we’ve created different setting folder locations for each operating system. If you want to avoid conflicts and “Data file missing” errors with your ongoing downloads, you might want to keep separate configurations for different operating systems (if you’re running frostwire off a removable disk for example).
Update (Sep 22th 2013) After FrostWire 5.6.5 you will be able to share the same settings directory for all operating systems, no more issues of “Data file missing”. Also we recommend that in the case of user.settings.dir.windows you use a relative file path, since mounting the USB drive on different computers might result in file paths starting with different letters, e.g. e:\, f:\, g:\…

NOTICE 2: You might want to keep a copy of your “.meta” file elsewhere, next time your FrostWire is updated it will certainly delete everything inside the folder containing binaries. All your configuration files (except .meta) and downloaded files will remain untouched (as always) after any updates.

NOTICE 3: No need to create configuration pair for operating systems you won’t use FrostWire on.

If you’re running FrostWire on an external drive we recommend that you point your “root_folder” (the place where all main default download folders go to) to be the same across different OSes, so that you can finish downloads that you may have started on a computer with say Windows (at work), on another that runs MacOSX (home), you will just have to restart the torrent, but since the data files will be on the expected location, it’ll pick up right where it left (we find this awesome)

configuration keys
(Where <osname> can be any of ‘windows’,’mac’,’posix’.)

user.settings.dir.<osname> the location where FrostWire will look for/create a settings folder which keeps track of all preferences and ongoing transfers.

user.settings.root_folder.<osname> the location of the default root downloads folder. Here FrostWire will create a “Downloads”, “From Device” and “Torrents” folders. The “Downloads” is the default save location, but you can change it in the BitTorrent settings later. “From Device” is where all files downloaded via Wi-Fi sharing will go, and “Torrents”, is where FrostWire will keep the .torrent files of transfers you start out of Bittorrent search results.

File paths can be either relative or absolute.

If you have any questions please leave a comment.
Cheers