Install Transmission on a Remote Machine (with Web UI)

This is another quick project that I felt well suited to be deployed on a Raspberry Pi or any other Linux server. Hook up some external storage to the Pi and you have essentially a NAS powerhouse with decent BitTorrent capability.

Transmission is fairly lightweight and has a web UI that allows for remote management which is ideal for what we're doing. Let's jump right in.

  1. Install the daemon: sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon
  2. Edit the configuration file under this path (more details below): /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/settings.json
  3. Do a: pkill -HUP transmission-da (to have daemon reload settings from above file)
  4. Connect to the web interface: http://ip-address:port/url (e.g. http://192.168.0.100:9091/transmission)
A couple things you should consider changing in the config file including:
  •  "download-dir" and "incomplete-dir" for partially and fully completed downloads to the path of an external drive or some other directory
  • "rpc-url" as specific path after the port (optional, can leave as-is)
  • "rpc-username" is the username that Transmission prompts for when connected
  • "rpc-password", the corresponding password
  • "rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*" - the 192.168.*.* wildcard allows for machines on the local network to connect and an extra *.*.*.* can also be added if you want to connect remotely from outside
  • "rpc-port" can remain the same unless an alternate port is desired
Note: It's recommended that you save the JSON configuration file as restarting the daemon appears to overwrite your changes with original defaults.