Schedule transmission bittorrent
October 7th, 2008
Problem
Transmission doesn’t include any scheduling functionality to start/stop/trottle torrents during the day/week.
Solution
Don’t run the gui client. Instead (or as well) invoke transmission-daemon from the command line and use crontab to apply the schedule via transmission-remote
Method
- Install the transmission-cli package corresponding to your Operating System
- Start transmission-daemon eg:
transmission-daemon -f -g /home/torrentuser/transmission-config -w /home/torrentuser/incoming - Test it is running by opening a browser and visiting http://localhost:9091
- Play with transmission-remote to get a feel for what you can do. eg: start and stop all torrents…
transmission-remote -t all -s
transmission-remote -t all -S - Setup your schedule in Cron with crontab
eg: to start all torrents at 2:02AM every day and stop them at 11:58AM…
crontab -e
02 02 * * * /usr/bin/transmission-remote -t all -s
58 11 * * * /usr/bin/transmission-remote -t all -S - optional: You might also play with at for scheduling once off tasks
John is a freelance programmer living in Sydney Australia. He blogs whatever takes his fancy; computing tips, travel letters, and random stuff from his life. He does it primarily to learn and demonstrate the running of a website.
This is great! thanks for the tips, it’s getting me started on wrangling my willful ubuntu system!
By the way, if you want to have it throttle, rather than stop entirely, based on a schedule, you can use the following command:
/usr/bin/transmission-remote -u 100
Moreover, you might want to look into http://gnome-schedule.sourceforge.net/ , which allows for a cool GUI for editing crontab.
thanks for the website John!
Some very handy tips here.
and thanks Luke throttling is a good addition.