This project is a collection of guidelines and tutorials explaining how to create a fully autonomous torrent machine and Plex Media Server out of a Raspberry Pi.
I execute the following commands on a new installation of Raspbian 9. As an editor I use vim, that I installed after the first boot with:
$ sudo apt-get install vim-nox
I used for this tutorial a Raspberry Pi 3B. Using a fresh Raspbian install and default settings I could not get the device to work for more than 20 minutes consecutively without freezing.
The Raspberry Pi 3 suffers apparently from problems due to voltage and heating. Therefore I tweaked settings and it stopped hanging.
- A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian, connected to the internet, whose intranet IP is known - the installation of Raspbian is out of scope.
- An external USB Drive.
- A private VPN account.
For this tutorial I used:
- 1 Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B (Linux raspberrypi 4.14.52-v7+ & Raspbian 9)
- Static IP address for the Raspberry Pi (192.168.0.10)
- 1 Trascend StoreJet 25M3 (2 TB) formatted with ExFAT
- 1 PureVPN premium account
Make sure that your Raspberry Pi has the latest updates installed:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
I referred to the following table to determine the best suited filesystem for my network:
| File System | Windows XP | Windows 7/8/10 | macOS (10.6.4 and earlier) | macOS (10.6.5 and later) | Ubuntu Linux | Playstation 4 | Xbox 360/One |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTFS | Yes | Yes | Read Only | Read Only | Yes | No | No/Yes |
| FAT32 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes |
| exFAT | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes (with ExFAT packages) | Yes (with MBR, not GUID) | No/Yes |
| HFS+ | No | (read-only with Boot Camp) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| APFS | No | No | No | Yes (macOS 10.13 or greater) | No | No | No |
| EXT 2, 3, 4 | No | Yes (with third-party software) | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
I decided to use ExFAT since I only work with Mac OS and Linux.
Execute the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install -y transmission-daemon transmission-cli transmission-common
And stop the demon to apply changes to the configuration that will allow you to manage Transmission remotely:
$ sudo service transmission-daemon stop
$ sudo vi /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
Look for rpc-whitelist and rpc-whitelist-enabled and make sure they look like this:
"rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*",
"rpc-whitelist-enable": "true",
Please note that this is assuming that your internal network works on 192.16.0.1/24. If otherwise please change the value accordingly.
Also, you can modify download-dir and incomplete-dir to point at the external USB drive, for example:
"download-dir": "/media/storage/downloads",
"incomplete-dir": "/media/storage/.tmp",
Please make sure that the directories exists on your external USB drive.
Once you are done you can restart the Transmission service:
$ sudo service transmission-daemon start
The web interface is already available at the address http://192.168.0.10:9091 (replace the IP address with the one used by the Raspberry Pi in your network).
You can login using transmission as both username and password.
Make sure that the Raspberry Pi connects to your preferred VPN on start-up.
If you want to automate even further your flow, by having Transmission downloading your favourite videos via an RSS feed, you can install Transmission-RSS.
The easiest is to install Transmission-RSS via gem. We will need a few packages to do so:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev
We also need gem's bundler:
$ sudo gem install bundler
Now we download the latest version of Transmission-RSS:
$ git clone https://github.com/nning/transmission-rss
We enter the main directoy, we bundle it, and we build:
$ cd transmission-rss/
$ bundle
$ sudo gem build transmission-rss.gemspec
and finally, we install it:
$ sudo gem install transmission-rss-*.gem
According to the README, I was supposed to find a configuration file (/etc/transmission-rss.conf), but it didn't exist. So I created it and put some basic parameters:
feeds:
- url: http://link_to_my_rss_feed
update_interval: 600
add_paused: false
server:
host: localhost
port: 9091
rpc_path: /transmission/rpc
login:
username: transmission
password: transmission
log:
target: /var/log/transmissiond-rss.log
level: debug
privileges:
user: root
group: root
client:
timeout: 5
fork: false
pid_file: false
seen_file: ~/.config/transmission/seen
Please note that the config file cannot contain any TAB, but only spaces. Therefore, if your editor is automatically indenting sub-options please verify that indentations only contain spaces. Any TAB will prevent Transmission-RSS from launching, throwing an error (e.g. "found character that cannot start any token").
To have Transmission-RSS starting at boot, we can create a service. Create /etc/systemd/system/transmission-rss.service and paste the following inside:
[Unit]
Description=Transmission RSS daemon.
After=network.target transmission-daemon.service
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -f
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
To have the service launched at boot:
$ sudo systemctl enable transmission-rss
If you reboot now, you should have:
- Your VPN (if configured) via OpenVPN
- Transmission
- Transmission-RSS
launching at boot. Running the command:
$ ps xuaw | grep 'openvpn\|transmission'
You should see the three running:
root 401 5.1 0.5 8640 5388 ? Ss 15:00 1:45 /usr/sbin/openvpn --daemon ovpn-purevpn --status /run/openvpn/purevpn.status 10 --cd /etc/openvpn --config /etc/openvp /purevpn.conf --writepid /run/openvpn/purevpn.pid
debian-+ 536 4.0 2.1 101268 20424 ? Ssl 15:00 1:21 /usr/bin/transmission-daemon -f --log-error
root 563 0.0 2.2 40436 21596 ? Sl 15:00 0:00 /usr/bin/ruby2.3 /usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -f
To install Plex Media Server we need to add a new repository and it's key:
$ wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ echo "deb https://dev2day.de/pms/ stretch main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list
We can now update our package list and install Plex Media Server:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver-installer
The configuration is stored in /etc/default/plexmediaserver.prev
We need to change the user the server run with from plex to the user that you are logging in with (pi by default):
PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USER=pi
and we can reboot:
$ sudo reboot
You can complete the setup opening the following link with your browser:
http://192.168.0.10:32400/web/
Don't forget to replace the IP with the one that your Raspberry Pi is using in your network.
When you are requested to add libraries, you should add the download folder of Transmission, in our example /media/storage/downloads.
Check this page.