transmission-seedbox

Simple docker-compose config to start a password-protected lightweight Transmission torrent seedbox with web UI (proxied through a Caddy HTTP server.

Usage

0. Make sure that docker and docker-compose are installed.

1. Edit .env and change the USER and PASS environment variables to set up the basic HTTP auth protection of the web UI.

2. Run docker-compose up! You should see both the torrent client and web server logs in your terminal.

   By default the web server starts on port 80. To change this port, set the HTTP_PORT environment variable like: HTTP_PORT=8000 docker-compose up.

3. Visit your server's address in a web browser to access Transmission web UI (e.g., http://yourserver/). Login using the username and password set in step #1. Use the web UI to upload and manage torrents.

4. Once a torrent has been completed, visit the /downloads URL path of your server (e.g., http://yourserver/downloads) to access and download the files.

   If you have a lot of files in your downloads folder, it may be helpful to use wget to recursively grab them all. For example: wget --no-parent --recursive http://yourserver/downloads/complete/.

5. To stop the torrent client and server, press Ctrl-C or issue the command: docker-compose down.

Persistence: To keep the torrent client and web server running even after logging out of the server, use a tmux or screen client. Or in step #2, use docker-compose up -d to run the services in "detached" mode.

Design philosophy

The general goal is to have a simple and quick way of starting a seedbox on any docker-ready server: just clone this repo and type docker-compose up. It should "just work" without any configuration (except setting username and password).

The torrent client should have a web UI and docker image, which meant that we had the following choices: rtorrent, deluge, transmission, and qbittorent. Although rtorrent seemed popular with seedboxes, its startup time through docker was very slow and its configuration seemed complex (needing its own nginx). Transmission seemed to be the easiest to setup out of the box with minimal configuration; startup time was also very fast.

For security and performance, we want to proxy Transmission's web UI through a web server. Caddy was selected over nginx for its ease in configuration. We also use Caddy to serve the completed torrents over HTTP so that we may re-download them to local computer.