Setup Transmission BT client

Transmission is small footprint, provides a web interface to control torrent downloads, good for headless device.

I use version 1.76. A copy of the source is here: transmission-1.76.tar.bz2

Make sure these are installed as stated in the transmission wiki:

• build-essential
• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• pkg-config
• libcurl4-openssl-dev
• intltool
• libxml2-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev
• libnotify-dev
• libglib2.0-dev

run:

tar jxvf transmission-1.76.tar.bz2
cd transmission-1.76/
./configure --enable-daemon --enable-cli --disable-gtk

Output excerpt:

Configuration:

        Source code location:          .
        Compiler:                      g++
        System or bundled libevent:    system
        DHT support:                   yes

        Build Mac client:              no
        Build GTK+ client:             no
          ... with gio support:        no
          ... with dbus-glib support:  no
          ... with libnotify support:  no
        Build Command-Line client:     yes
        Build Daemon:                  yes

Copy the compiled programs transmission-daemon and transmission-remote to /usr/local/bin/ of the voyage box.

Copy the web files to /usr/local/share/transmission

Create a user transmisson to run the daemon, and create the folder(in tmpfs) to hold the settings files:

useradd transmission
# files under /var/tmp will survive reboot thanks to the voyage init scripts
mkdir /var/tmp/transmission-daemon
chown transmission:transmission /var/tmp/transmission-daemon

Put this init script in /etc/init.d/. My customization is:

USERNAME=transmission
TRANSMISSION_HOME="/var/tmp/transmission-daemon"

Start the transmission-daemon so that a set of config files will be created in /var/tmp/transmission-daemon:

/var/tmp/transmission-daemon/:
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 transmission transmission   40 Dec 14 17:55 blocklists
drwxr-xr-x 2 transmission transmission   40 Jan  4 19:38 resume
-rw-r--r-- 1 transmission transmission 1595 Dec 21 10:54 settings.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 transmission transmission  154 Dec 18 11:49 stats.json
drwxr-xr-x 2 transmission transmission   40 Jan  4 19:38 torrents

Stop the daemon and edit the file settings.json to set username, password, port…etc.

Open the web http://hostname:port/transmission/web/ to use it.