Primary liver cancer (PLC) ranks the sixth in the incidence of malignant tumors and fourth in the cancer-related mortality. Surgical resection and liver transplantation are still considered as the gold standard treatments for patients with resectable PLC. However, only 30.2% of newly-diagnosed patients have surgical indications. For patients ineligible for surgery, local treatment methods including TACE, radiofrequency ablation (RFA), external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and Yttrium-90 microsphere brachytherapy are commonly adopted in clinical practice. Among them, radiotherapy is an important non-invasive treatment option, and its clinical application value is increasingly prominent. In recent years, revolutionary technological progress has been achieved in radiotherapy including intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) and charged particle therapy (CPT) such as protons and carbon ions. In this article, radiotherapy strategies and side effects of ablation radiotherapy for early PLC, TACE combined with EBRT, radiotherapy for PLC complicated with great vessel invasion, neoadjuvant radiotherapy and downstaging radiotherapy, and SBRT as a bridging therapy to liver transplantation were systematically illustrated. Local radiotherapy combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors has achieved favorable outcomes in advanced PLC patients. It is still urgent to explore combined regimen of radiotherapy and immunotherapy with both targeted and distant effects.