Transmission Primer
Start the download of a magnet URL by running
transmission-cli MAGNET_URL
which will download your torrent into the download directory which you will
find defined within the download-dir field inside the
~/.config/transmission/settings.json file. Unless specified otherwise, it will
default to your ~/Downloads directory.
Daemon
Start the Transmission daemon by running
transmission-daemon
which start the daemon in the background and opens up a web portal on port 9091.
Remote
With the Transmission daemon started, one can use transmission-remote to
control the torrent client.
Some of the information for your daemon can observed through the output of
transmission-remote -si
which is short for
transmission-remote --session-info
and prints information regarding:
- networking settings
- listening ports
- download/upload speed restrictions
- storage settings
- daemon configuration file
- download directory
some of which is accessible through the Preferences modal in the web portal.
From now on, I’ll just print short and long versions of commands within the same block as follows:
short snippet
longer, more verbose, snippet which is often easier to interpret
Add Torrent
In order to download a torrent through the daemon run
transmission-remote -a TORRENT_URL
transmission-remote --add TORRENT_URL
Remote Torrent
Remove a torrent by id. Examine the Select Torrents section
on how to find the id for a torrent (spoiler: list transmission-remote -l as
documented in the List Torrents section)
transmission-remote -r TORRENT_ID
transmission-remote --remove TORRENT_ID
List Torrents
One may list Torrents by running
transmission-remote -l
transmission-remote --list
Select Torrents
While listing torrents you may have observed that the
torrents are listed by ID. This ID can used to specify a torrent through the
-t or --torrent argument.
Failing to select the torrents to operate on may in some cases default to
-tall or --torrent all to list all torrents.
Specify multiple ids by separating them with commas as follows
-t4,2,99
-t 4,2,99
Start Torrent
Start a torrent by running
transmission-remote -t 3 -s
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --stop
Stop torrent
Stop a Torrent by running
transmission-remote -t 3 -S
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --stop
and yes, since -s is already reserved for --start, you observe how the
short version may not always be very self-explanatory.
List the files for a given torrent
In order to list the files that comprise torrent 3, for example, one may run:
transmission-remote -t 3 -f
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --files
Show info for a given torrent
In order to observe the magnet link, the directory into which it is being downloaded, the relevant download metrics and a bit of history for a given torrent, one may run:
transmission-remote -t 3 -i
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --info
List info trackers for torrent
The info trackers are the resources connected to, generally over port 6969, that keep track of where a Torrent is to be downloaded from and which seeders and leechers are connected. Run the following command to find out which trackers are known for the torrent of interest:
transmission-remote -t 3 -it
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --info-trackers
Add a tracker for a given Torrent
In case you want to manually add a tracker for a torrent, run
transmission-remote -t 3 -td TRACKER
transmission-remote --torrent 3 --tracker-add TRACKER
and replace TRACKER with the URL of the tracker you’re wanting to add.