Transmission Command-line Bit-torrent Programs
I was after a method of downloading and seeding bit-torrents exclusively from the command-line.
I tried aria2
but found it unreliable. I don't know if it was because I was doing something wrong
but none of the torrent files I downloaded were not corrupted in some way.
And anyway I wanted something to run in the background.
I tried transmission-cli
. Better results but again this was not something that just ran in the
background.
So I installed a pair of related programs: transmission-daemon
and transmission-remote
.
The Daemon part of this program is exactly that, a daemon
that runs, as all daemons do, in the
background.
And the Remote part is a command-line program to control it.
The remote
part is included in the transmission-cli
package.
So:
$ sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon transmission-cli
Will install them both on Debian or Debian derivatives. Although why you're running a derivative when you could run Debian I don't know.
The default installation of transmission-daemon
is configured for the user it runs to be set to
transmission
and the password is also set to transmission
.
And by default it is only possible to access the daemon and the management web page from the local
machine (localhost
).
This led to a tedious situation, any command entered to make transmission-remote
do anything
with the daemon meant this was the command-line:
$ transmission-remote localhost --auth transmission:transmission <command>
I don't want to have to type that in every time.
So I set up an alias in .bash_aliases
:
alias trem='transmission-remote localhost --auth transmission:transmission'
Now I can just type:
$ trem <command>
For example, to add a torrent:
$ trem --add <torrent>
To list all the current torrents and their status:
$ trem --list
To remove and delete a torrent:
$ trem -tN --remove-and-delete
(where N is the number in the list returned by the --list
command).
To start a torrent:
$ trem -tN --start
And to stop one:
trem -tN --stop
There are loads of other commands but these are the ones I use the most, and mostly --add
and
--list
.
Note also that transmission
will handle the magnet
links found on the Pirate Bay download
site.