Transmission PR Web Client

Written by Bjarke Viksoe.
This article was submitted 12/28/2020.

This is a web client for the Transmission BitTorrent daemon.

This is a recreation of an existing Transmission BitTorrent web client, the Transmission Web Control. That is actually a fully functional client, but I wanted to fix a few bugs and add a few features, and found that it was easier to just rewrite the entire web app. I tend to rewrite many of the utilities I use frequently, so that I can customize them appropriately. And also because I write such nice JavaScript.

This version of the Transmission Web Control contains the following fixes:

Support for Start Now action.
UI for Metadata download phase.
Better usage of colors and more intuitive cell units.
Peer country flags using Geo IP integration.
List Selection doesn't disappear so context menus now work.
Dynamic list refresh feature added.
Session timeout recovery.

Other than that, it features all the functionality exposed by the Transmission RPC service.

You'll need to use a modern Web browser since the website requires modern JavaScript.
Also, the Transmission client still relies on EasyUI UI Framework for its user-interface.

Installation

You cannot just launch the web-site through its index.html from any folder because it needs to communicate with the Transmission RPC service. And that RPC service will not set the CORS (Cross-origin Resource Sharing) Policy HTTP headers! So your browser will refuse to talk to it.

Instead the Transmission daemon installation usually provides a small built-in HTTP server where you can copy the entire site to. Alternatively, you may be able to set a TRANSMISSION_WEB_HOME environment variable to point to the website folder and restart your Transmission installation. Or just use my small hacked web-server to proxy it for testing.

In any case, you will need a working Transmission daemon installation to properly see the web client.

Installing with Transmission QT

Here are the instructions for installing with the default Transmission software (on Windows, Mac and LINUX).

Install Transmission from here.
Make sure to choose both "daemon" and "Web interface" options.
Copy the /web folder from my download to your ...\Transmission\web folder.
(You shall overwrite the existing index.html file.)
Run the newly installed "QT Client".
In the "Edit / Preferences" menu, choose "Remote" tab and "Allow Remote Access".
Press the "Open Web Client" button or open http://localhost:9091/transmission/web/ in a browser.

Alternative Installation

You can also start it through a little test web-server that I've included in the download.
It includes a small proxy endpoint that will allow you to test the website against your current Transmission installation. You'll need to have nodejs installed to run the web-server. And you'll also need to edit the test-server.js to set the correct remote host-name. This is a great option for testing against an existing installation on a NAS or similar.

Download Files

TransmissionPR (676 KiB)