transmission-4-centos-7

Files to support installation of the Transmission 4.0 client on CentOS 7.

Repository contents

This directory contains:

An Ansible task/playbook to compile and install Transmission 4.0 on CentOS 7
A systemd unit file suitable for running the Transmission 4.0 daemon
logrotate, sysconfig, and tmpfiles.d configuration files for the Transmission 4.0 daemon

The Ansible task

The transmission4-installation.yaml file is an Ansible task that will build and install Transmission 4.0 from source on CentOS 7. It can be included from your playbook, or run as its own independent playbook. Configuration and usage are described below.

Configuring the Ansible task

Set the options in the "General configuration, "Transmission configuration," and "cURL configuration" sections to your liking. The default values should work for most cases. If you include the task from within your own playbook, you can define any of the following variables there to override the task defaults:

build_directory - a temporary directory for downloading and compiling files
do_cleanup - whether or not to automatically delete build artifacts after successful installation
transmission_version - the target transmission version e.g. '4.0.0'
trasmission_sha256 - sha256 of the .tar.xz distribution of the target transmission version
transmission_configure_options - CMake3 options for configuring Transmission
curl_configure_options - configure options for cURL

Running the Ansible task

You can either ansible.builtin.include the .yaml file from your own playbook, or use it as a stand-alone playbook by uncommenting a few lines and specifying your own hosts: value.

Running the task performs the following actions:

Create a temporary build directory (by default, /tmp/transmission4)
Check to see if cURL 7.77.0 or newer is present; if not, download and install a temporary copy of the latest cURL release in the build directory. Transmission 4 requires libcurl features not available in cURL < 7.77.0.
Install several prerequisites (via yum) required for the build process: cmake3, gettext, intltool, m4, make, openssl-devel, perl-XML-Parser, pkgconfig
Temporarily install (via yum) the Red Hat Developer Toolset 7.0. CentOS 7 has gcc-c++ version 4.8.5, which is not sufficient to compile Transmission 4.0. The devtools-7 package provides gcc-c++ 7.3.1.
Download, compile, and install the specified Transmission version
Add a transmission user and group to the system, if they don't already exist
Create /var/lib/transmission where the daemon will write its files
Install a systemd unit file, plus logrotate, sysconfig, and tmpfiles.d configuration files for Transmission; those files are all downloaded from this repository
After successful installation, the Red Hat Developer Toolset 7.0 will be uninstalled, and the temporary build directory will be removed. You can disable this by setting do_cleanup to false.

The following will be added to your system if they don't already exist:

a "transmission" user and group, which will run the transmission daemon
/etc/logrotate.d/transmission4-daemon
/etc/sysconfig/transmission4-daemon
/etc/systemd/system/transmission4-daemon.service
/etc/tmpfiles.d/transmission4-daemon.conf
/var/lib/transmission
/var/log/transmission

Notes and caveats

The Ansible task installs a systemd unit file, but it doesn't automatically start or enable the service. You'll need to do that yourself with systemctl start transmission4-daemon and systemctl enable transmission4-daemon.

A settings.json file is not installed. If you have a settings.json file you want to use, place it into /var/lib/transmission prior to starting the transmission4-daemon service. Otherwise, Transmission will create a default settings file the first time it runs.

I only use the Transmission daemon and the web interface, so that's all I've tested. Building the Qt client is configured to "AUTO" by default, which I suppose will compile the GUI if you're running in a desktop environment. You'll at least end up with the CLI binaries: transmission-cli, transmission-create, transmission-daemon, transmission-edit, transmission-remote, and transmission-show.

The Transmission 4.0 binaries will be installed to /usr/local/bin. If you already have Transmission 3.0 from the excellent Geekery repository -- which installs its binaries to /usr/bin instead -- you'll end up with both versions of Transmission installed. This is intentional. Running the Ansible task shouldn't clobber or overwrite any existing files, and the system files it installs are all named using a transmission4 scheme to keep them separate from Transmission 3.0.

Bugs

If you encounter a problem with the Ansible task, please open a new issue in this repository.