Download the files directly through web UI ?

Discussion of the Web Interface for Transmission, formerly known as Clutch. This applies to all version of Transmission
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Fraaargh
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 2:45 pm

Download the files directly through web UI ?

Post by Fraaargh »

Hi all,
this is my 1st post event hough I've been a long time happy Transmission user.
I was wondering: is there any way (or any alternative GUI) that would enable me to download directly through the web GUI the file downloaded by Transmission ?
The goal would be to download home easily what my fast server hosted on the net has downloaded.

Regards !
killemov
Posts: 533
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Download the files directly through web UI ?

Post by killemov »

Shift offers this. I would advise using an actual webserver like lighttpd to serve the file from disk. You can configure Shift to create any type of URI, ftp:// for example.
cjohnweb
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 03, 2019 7:31 pm

Re: Download the files directly through web UI ?

Post by cjohnweb »

In my case I have Transmission running on a VPS in Amsterdam with a web proxy to tracker.example.com since it is usually blocked from my ISP. I configured Transmission to download completed torrents to a folder on a bigger disk drive. I also have apache2 running (on debian or ubuntu systems just apt-get install apache2)...Then all I have to do is create a symlink from a web accessible directory to my completed torrents directory ( for example: cd /var/www/html/; ln -s /path/to/completed-torrents ./completed). You may also need to double check permissions for the target folder of the symlink.

For something like this, just add your www-data (apache2) user to your transmission group.
You can see what groups a user belongs to with this: groups username
Add the user to a group like so: adduser www-data debian-transmission

And lastly, go to the folder above where your download your torrents and make sure the completed folder and all its contents belong to the transmission group. Change the owner and access level permissions to something like this:

chown -Rv transmission:www-transmission ./completed
chmod -Rv 0755 ../completed

To recap, the idea is simple: add your www-data user to the transmission group and then ensure the completed folder and contents use this group. Now www-data AND transmission users can access the same files. Then create a symlink to the completed torrents folder in a web accessible folder.

I have many domains and subdomains configured in my apache2 vhosts, so I stuck mine in an obfuscated subdomain and I've also added a simple apache2 basic authentication requirement so no one else can access my downloaded files without the username and password. It's a relatively simple solution for the short term. In the long run, I'd like to use the same basic concept but using php or node/react, I would write a web interface for browsing the files in the directory and upon selecting a movie file, play it through a nicer movie player. There is probably already file browser type solutions out there that would suffice with minor modifications.
killemov
Posts: 533
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Download the files directly through web UI ?

Post by killemov »

Great! And now you can use Shift to make that last part happen.
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