I have a PC that I use as server running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and I wanted to install a command-line torrent client and run it as a service to download & seed stuff with no need of a monitor or X attached to it (because I don’t have any of them :P ). So after trying a few clients I decided to stick to Transmission, Ubuntu’s default torrent client.

To get this working, this is what I did:

1) In order to use it as a service, you have to download transmission-cli package which has the transmission-daemon & transmission-remote bins.

2) Before this, I added a new apt sources to the /etc/sources.list because Ubuntu’s sources has a very out-of-date version. So open /etc/sources.list and add the following lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bortis/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bortis/ubuntu hardy main

Then update & install.

3) You should now have the client intalled. But to use it as a service / daemon, go to:

http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/HeadlessUsageDebian

http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/HeadlessUsage/General
and follow the instructions.

Remember to set the correct permissions to the TRANSMISSION_HOME & TORRENTFOLDER directories to allow writing & reading to the user you set in USERNAME.

I had some problems with transmission populating the default config file “settings.json”. What I did was to manually create the file and add this default content:

{
    "blocklist-enabled": 0,
    "download-dir": "\/shares\/internal\/PUBLIC\/Torrent\/work",
    "download-limit": 100,
    "download-limit-enabled": 0,
    "encryption": 0,
    "max-peers-global": 200,
    "peer-port": 51413,
    "pex-enabled": 1,
    "port-forwarding-enabled": 1,
    "rpc-access-control-list": "+127.0.0.1",
    "rpc-authentication-required": 0,
    "rpc-password": "",
    "rpc-port": 9091,
    "rpc-username": "",
    "upload-limit": 40,
    "upload-limit-enabled": 1
}

You can find out what options for this config files are available at:

http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles

Hope it helps, cheers!