How do you set a password for transmission-daemon, the BitTorrent client server?

Question

The config file is ambiguous, and keeps getting overwritten when you restart the daemon in Debian, anyway.

In /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json, there are these options:

rpc-username
rpc-password
proxy-auth-username
proxy-auth-password

Every time I restart the daemon with:

/etc/init.d/transmission-daemon restart

It overwrites rpc-password, and the password it prints doesn't work anyway.

Does anyone know how to set the password properly? I don't want to disable it.

Answer 1

Do these things in the exact order:

1. Shutdown: /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon stop
2. Write the rpc-password in the /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json file, in double-quotes.
3. Save that file
4. Startup: /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start
5. Login to the page, it's at port 9091
6. Type in your password.

The password that's being overwritten is a hash. The program is smarter than usual and detects that your password is not a hash, so it overwrites the password with the hash to be secure. So your password should work.

However, remember that it writes the password it loaded with when it shuts down. So doing /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon restart will not do what you expect if you've written the file while it's running.