(headless) Transmission installation on Debian

Here is a brief how-to install transmission bt on Debian (headless installation for your server). The same how-to can be used for ubuntu installation (I guess with some changes on the prerequisite packages and -of course- sudo).

Most of the information is gathered from multiple pages in transmission's wiki... not cool.



Before I begin notice that commands which start with "#" need to be executed as root. Don't be always logged in as root because you will create a mess...

So first we install the prerequisite packages

#apt-get install ca-certificates libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev pkg-config build-essential intltool checkinstall  

Then we need to get the latest event library. Debian doesn't have the latest one so we will download it and compile it from the source. The site for libevent is http://libevent.org/

wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz

tar xzf libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz

cd libevent-2.0.21-stable

CFLAGS="-Os -march=native" ./configure && make

Then we execute checkinstall command as root. Checkinstall is basically like make install but it also creates a .deb file which is manageable by dpkg. So later we can remove our installed programs that are compiled from source with no fuzz. More info here 

#checkinstall

Time to install transmission

wget http://download.transmissionbt.com/files/transmission-2.73.tar.bz2 

tar xjf transmission-2.73.tar.bz2

cd transmission-2.73

CFLAGS="-Os -march=native" ./configure && make

#checkinstall

It is better to run transmission as a user different than root and different than our main linux user. We add a user with no password

#adduser --disabled-password transmission

We switch to the transmission user and we run transmission daemon just to create the initial files

#su transmission

transmission-daemon -f

We let it run for a couple of seconds and we exit with ctrl+c

Then we create as root the daemon startup script and we give execution rights. The content of the startup script can be found here just copy / paste it inside the transmission-daemon file

#nano /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon

#chmod +x /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon

The settings of transmission can be found in /home/transmission/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json here you can find more information.

Start transmission with

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

That's all.


sources:
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building#Buildingfromatarball
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/HeadlessUsage/General