Transmission¶
Transmission is a torrent downloader that has the option to run in a CLI daemon, perfect for our little headless server.
Installation¶
To install Transmission, we'll need to add a PPA source, update the sources and directly install.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-common transmission-daemon
Configuration¶
Since our server OS is installed in a small SSD, we're going to use an internal HDD to store our downloads. I'll assume you already have the HDD mounted properly. For the sake of the example, we're going to mount our HDD in /media/internal_sata.
We're going to create a Downloads folder and we'll grant it full permissions so we don't run into issues with permissions when downloading.
mkdir /media/internal_sata/Downloads
sudo chmod 777 -R /media/internal/sata_Downloads
Now to configure it, we need to stop the Transmission service and edit the config file.
sudo systemctl stop transmission-daemon.service
sudo nano /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/settings.json
In this file, we'll edit just the next lines:
"rpc-enabled": true,
"rpc-password": "password here",
"rpc-username": "user login",
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,
"download-dir": "/home/transmission/Downloads",
"incomplete-dir": "/home/transmission/Downloads",
"umask": 2,
Note
As a little explanation, rpc-password can be set as whatever you want, once the file is saved, your password will be encrypted, so no need to worry about storing your password in plain text. The rpc-username can be set as whatever you want, it doesn't have anything to do with your server username, this will be used to login to Transmission on a remote session, same goes for rpc-password.
We need to add a firewall rule.
sudo ufw allow 9091/tcp
So we can now start the Transmission service.
sudo systemctl start transmission-daemon.service
Connecting to your Transmission Session¶
There are lots of ways to connect to Transmission, my two favorite ones are: Transmission Remote GUI and Transmission Web GUI, the latter being the one already included with Transmission. With the first one you can access Transmission as if it was a regular Torrent client on your PC, with Transmission Web, you can access it through a web browser by accessing http://serverip:9091, login with your credentials and you're ready to go.