When it comes to BitTorrent clients, there are a lot to choose from. After using uTorrent for a while I found myself looking for a lightweight (and ad-free) alternative. In some cases, you will find that a heavy desktop app can be replaced by a simple command line alternative and Transmission CLI offers just that. Transmission is a popular cross-platform BitTorrent client that comes in a variety of flavours, including native Mac and GTK+ versions with a desktop GUI familiar to anyone who has used uTorrent. There is also a command line interface for Transmission which turned out to be perfect for my occasional BitTorrent requirements. This guide will run you through the basic usage of the terminal client.
Transmission is the default BitTorrent client in many Linux distributions and transmission-cli can be found in most official repositories. For OSX, Transmission CLI can be installed with the excellent package manager Homebrew:
>_ brew install transmission
The installation will include a set of command line utilities but for the scope of this tutorial we will cover just two of these: transmission-daemon and transmission-remote.
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transmission-daemon This is the Transmission client itself, when a Transmission session is started it will run quietly as a background process and can be controlled with the remote utility.
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transmission-remote This is the control utility used for adding and removing torrents.
Out of the box, the default settings should be fine for simple use. Although one thing you may want to update is the download directory for completed torrents. This can be set with the following command:
>_ transmission-daemon --download-dir "your-download-directory-path"
To confirm the directory location you can run this command which will print out the current settings:
>_ transmission-daemon --dump-settings
For a full list of available configuration options, check out the manual page.
>_ man transmission-daemon
The first thing you will want to do is start the Transmission session, you can do this by simply running the daemon:
>_ transmission-daemon
To add a torrent you will use transmission-remote and pass the torrent file location as a parameter with the -a option. The file location can either be a local path to a downloaded torrent file or a direct URL to the online location.
>_ transmission-remote -a "http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.10/ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent"
Magnet links are also supported and can be added in exactly the same way.
>_ transmission-remote -a "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9f9165d9a281a9b8e782cd5176bbcc8256fd1871&dn=Ubuntu+16.04.1+LTS+Desktop+64-bit&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fzer0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969"
The status of your downloads can be checked at any time by using the list -l command:
>_ transmission-remote -l
This will display a list of loaded torrents and the status of each download.
It is always good to seed a torrent for as long as possible, but when your housemate is knocking on your door and complaining about the bandwidth, here is how to remove the torrent.
In the download list output you can see that each loaded torrent has an ID in the left-hand column. You can use this ID to select a torrent by using the -t command followed by -r to remove.
>_ transmission-remote -t 3 -r
You can select multiple torrents by passing comma separated ID’s.
>_ transmission-remote -t 3,4 -r
Alternatively you can also pass all to remove everything.
>_ transmission-remote -t all -r