Setting up Transmission (bittorrent) with Clutch WebUI

Introduction

This document will show you how you can setup Transmission BitTorrent client on Alpine Linux and control it with a nice HTTP web-interface. It is assumed that you know the basics of Alpine Linux (package management and internals) and you have enough storage available for your downloaded media (i.e. USB hard drive) and, of course, a working internet connection.

Setting up Transmission

Lets install it:

# apk add transmission-daemon

This should install latest available version of Transmission (available on Alpine). After the installation is complete you should have default configuration file for init in /etc/conf.d/transmission-daemon.

By default, Transmission will run as the user transmission. If you need to make changes, do so, and save them. You can restart transmission-daemon and see if all is working as desired:

# rc-service transmission-daemon restart

To configure the transmission settings (including the download location), edit the configuration file here: /var/lib/transmission/config/settings.json

If everything is working, you should see transmission-daemon running with the following command:

$ ps

If you change the download location in the settings, remember to transfer ownership to the transmission user and group.

# chown -R transmission:transmission <DOWNLOAD_FOLDER>

It may also be convenient for the root user to be able to access the files when administering the server. An easy way to do this is to add the root user to the transmission group:

# addgroup root transmission

Let's add transmission to our system start:

# rc-update add transmission-daemon

The transmission web GUI will run on http://<IP_ADDRESS>:9091/transmission

Saving your changes to disk

Now is a good time to write your changes to disk:

# lbu_commit device