Intro

Hardware used: Raspberry Pi 3B+ Source

Setup

Update

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Install transmission

sudo apt install transmission-daemon

We need to stop the daemon because it is automatically started.

sudo systemctl stop transmission-daemon

Create torrent directories

sudo mkdir -p /media/HDD/torrent-inprogress
sudo mkdir -p /media/HDD/torrent-complete

Give user pi access over these directories SOS! This had no effect

sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/HDD/torrent-inprogress
sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/HDD/torrent-complete

Configure transmission

Edit configuration file

sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Modify these configurations options with below changes

"incomplete-dir": "/media/HDD/torrent-inprogress",
"download-dir":   "/media/HDD/torrent_complete",
"incomplete-dir-enabled": true,
"rpc-password":  "Your_Password",
"rpc-username":  "Your_Username",
"rpc-whitelist": "192.168.*.*",

User permissions

Old way is to add user pi into the debian-transmission group

sudo usermod -a -G debian-transmission pi

Newer way is to add user debian-transmission into the pi group

sudo usermod -a -G pi debian-transmission

Restart

Now we need to tell the service manager to reload all service configuration files by running the following command. Otherwise, systemctl will try to use the older version of the service file.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Start back up the Transmission daemon service

sudo systemctl start transmission-daemon