Transmission

Transmission is a solid torrent downloader daemon which has a nice web UI and it's really simple to operate.

I have been experiencing quite some issues running Transmission lately (errors in connecting to trackers mostly, which leads to zero peers to download from) which come out of nowhere. Since YMMV, here are the instructions for Transmission for you.

Transmission is easily installed and managed within Gentoo linux since there is an ebuild for it. All you need to do is to emerge it:

 > emerge -v transmission

This step will create a dedicated transmission user but you will want to add it to the group media, that you have created before, so that the it will be able to access and manage your media collection:

 > usermod -a -G media transmission

Also, you want to move Transmission home folder under /data/daemons/transmission for consistency and to be protected on the RAID array. but since Gentoo decided that the transmission user doesn't have a real home, you need to move it manually:

 > mv /var/lib/transmission /data/daemons/transmission

then you need to change the user transmission runs under, this is to ensure that the other tools can fetch the downloads once complete. This is pretty easy, open the file /etc/conf.d/transmission-daemon and change the runas_user setting like this:

runas_user=transmission:media

Before you proceed, you should make Transmission accessible via the reverse-proxy, so that access, configuration and usage will be simplified from the beginning. Add this file to /etc/nginx/folders:

transmission.conf

# Transmission
location /transmission/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9091;
}

Add this to your /etc/nginx/folders/main.conf:

include "folders/transmission.conf";

and restart nginx:

 > /etc/init.d/nginx restart

You need to change some default Transmission settings now, edit the file /data/daemons/transmission/config/settings.json and make sure to change the following settings:

   "download-dir": "/data/daemons/transmission/downloads",
   "rpc-url": "/transmission/",
    "bind-address-ipv4": "127.0.0.1",
    "rpc-bind-address": "127.0.0.1",

Where:

• download-dir: where the fully downloaded files will be moved
• rcp-url: the base-url where the Transmission web GUI is reverse-proxied
• bind-address-ipv4 / rpc-bind-address: for security reasons, accept only local connections.

Now, setup the daemon to start at boot, and start it now:

 > rc-update add transmission-daemon default
 > /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start

Every download client needs to be integrated in your other tools. Unfortunately, you need to do it by hand for every tool.

Head to the Transmission web GUI from which you add your manual downloads or manage the automatic downloads added by the other tools.

Now, head on to install the more downloaders…

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