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About
Transmission is a light-weight and cross-platform BitTorrent client with full encryption, DHT, µTP, PEX and Magnet Link support. It is the default BitTorrent client for Debian Gnome.
Contents
Installation
If you have installed your Debian Gnome desktop from tasksel then transmission-gtk should be installed by default, but it is possible to use one more of the following packages, depending on your requirements:
transmission-cli - A collection of cli tools for transmission.
transmission-gtk - A BitTorrent client using a GTK interface.
transmission-qt - A BitTorrent client using a QT interface.
transmission-remote-cli - A ncurses interface for the Transmission BitTorrent daemon (As of February 2020 only available for Debian stable buster and older releases; it has been removed from testing and unstable, so it will probably not be present in future Debian stable releases.)
Server installation
On a server you can install a BitTorrent daemon and connect to it using a web interface, by installing transmission-daemon.
Configuration
The transmission-gtk and transmission-qt clients can be configured via the application or via ~/.config/transmission/settings.json.
The transmission-daemon can be configured by editing /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json.
Configurating settings.json
Changes made manually to the file /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json while the daemon is running will be silently overwritten on transmission exit. You need to stop it first, make changes and start it again.
service transmission-daemon stop mcedit /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json service transmission-daemon start
The setting.json file is quite self explanatory but the common things that might need editing are:
(Full explanation here)
- "download-dir": "/var/lib/transmission-daemon/downloads": the location of the finished downloads
"rpc-password": "*(Hh09ajdf-9djfd89ash7a8ggG&*g98h8009hj90": the password for the web interface, replace the hash with a plain text password and it will be hashed on reload
- "rpc-username": "transmission": user name for web interface
"rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1": IPs allowed to access the daemon, something like "rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*", is the formatting for the IP addresses
Change default user on the daemon
In case you want to set a different user than the default debian-transmission user, you need to create a configuration file to overwrite default settings.
# systemctl edit transmission-daemon.service
Then add these lines:
[Service] User=USER
Where "USER" is the name of the user you want to run the daemon as.
The file is then located then in /etc/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service.d/override.conf.
Or you can edit directly the file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/transmission-daemon.service.
Change permissions on download directory
If you have transmission on a server, you might want to edit downloaded files from local stations. Good choice is to make the download directory editable by a group of your stations users.
Change umask in settings.json to umask = 0 or even umask=7 (decimal explanation, the json markup language only accepts numbers in base 10). Finally change umask of the transmission daemon by adding UMask=007 to /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/transmission-daemon.service,
- change permissions of the download directory and probably change group of transmission daemon default user.
Connecting to the daemon
Web Interface
Once the daemon is running, it can be accessed from your web browser by pointing it at http://127.0.0.1:9091 or if you come from local network http://ip-address-of-server:9091 (once you have whitelisted the IP range).
Command line app CLI and TUI
For connecting to a daemon from the shell you can use stig (https://github.com/rndusr/stig). You can manipulate torrents and get stats. For example, with stig ls active you get active torrents.
Other possibilities
The are plenty of other ways to access the daemon - see https://transmissionbt.com/resources/.
External Links
https://github.com/transmission/transmission/wiki - Transmission wiki