Set Up a Streaming Media Server – Pt. 4 – Install Transmission

Now we’ll be installing Transmission. This is a torrent client that has a web front end.

First, we need to add transmission to our repository and install it.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-common transmission-daemon

Next, we need to create a new group and add our user to it. My username is “server”. We’ll then assign permissions to the Downloads folder for Transmission to use it without any weird issues.

sudo usermod -a -G debian-transmission server
sudo chgrp -R debian-transmission /home/server/Downloads
sudo chmod -R 777 /home/server/Downloads

We need to stop the Transmission service so we can edit a config file.

sudo /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon stop
sudo vim /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

In this file, we’re only looking for a few different things to change. Mainly, where to download the files, as well as adding in a few lines at the bottom to support watch directories. This will be where Transmission will look for new torrent files.

"download-dir": "/home/server/Downloads/Movies",
"incomplete-dir": "/home/server/Downloads/Incomplete",
"incomplete-dir-enabled": true,
"rpc-authentication-required": false,
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,
"watch-dir": "/home/server/Downloads/Torrents",
"watch-dir-enabled": true

This is a JSON file, so every line ends with a comma EXCEPT for the last one.

Once this is saved, we can start the Transmission service again.

sudo /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start