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Building Transmission

docs/Building-Transmission.md

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Original Source

Getting the Source

The source code for both official and nightly releases can be found on our download page.

On macOS

While the prerequisites for running the app are:

  • macOS 11.0 or newer

The actual software prerequisites for building the app are based on GitHub Actions macos-14:

  • macOS 14.8.3 or newer
  • Xcode 15.0.1 or newer

Building the project on Mac requires the source to be retrieved from GitHub. Pre-packaged source code will not compile.

bash
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/transmission/transmission Transmission

If building from source is too daunting for you, check out the nightly builds. (Note: These are untested snapshots. Use them with care.)

Building the native app with Xcode

Transmission has an Xcode project file for building in Xcode.

  • Open Transmission.xcodeproj
  • Run the Transmission scheme

Building the native app with CMake

Build the app:

bash
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build -t transmission-mac
open ./build/macosx/Transmission.app

Building the GTK app with CMake

Install GTK and build the app:

bash
brew install gtk4 gtkmm4
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DENABLE_GTK=ON -DENABLE_MAC=OFF
cmake --build build -t transmission-gtk
./build/gtk/transmission-gtk

Building the QT app with CMake

Install QT and build the app:

bash
brew install qt
brew services start dbus
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DENABLE_QT=ON -DENABLE_MAC=OFF
cmake --build build -t transmission-qt
./build/qt/transmission-qt

On Unix

Prerequisites

Debian 13 / Trixie

On Debian, you can build transmission with a few dependencies on top of a base installation.

For building transmission-daemon you will need basic dependencies:

bash
$ sudo apt install build-essential cmake git libcurl4-openssl-dev

These packages are not mandatory for a working binary. Transmission brings its own libraries if they aren't installed, except for libsystemd-dev.

bash
$ sudo apt install libb64-dev libdeflate-dev libevent-dev libminiupnpc-dev libnatpmp-dev libsystemd-dev

You likely want to install transmission as a native GUI application. There are two options, GTK and Qt.

GTK 3 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-3.0-dev

GTK 4 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-4.0-dev

Qt5 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev

Qt6 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install qt6-svg-dev qt6-tools-dev

Then you can begin building.

Debian 12 / Bookworm

On Debian, you can build transmission with a few dependencies on top of a base installation.

For building transmission-daemon you will need basic dependencies:

bash
$ sudo apt install build-essential cmake git libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev

These packages are not mandatory for a working binary. Transmission brings its own libraries if they aren't installed, except for libsystemd-dev.

bash
$ sudo apt install libb64-dev libdeflate-dev libevent-dev libminiupnpc-dev libnatpmp-dev libpsl-dev libsystemd-dev

You likely want to install transmission as a native GUI application. There are two options, GTK and Qt.

GTK 3 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-3.0-dev

Qt5 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev

Qt6 client:

bash
$ sudo apt install qt6-svg-dev qt6-tools-dev

Then you can begin building.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, you can install the required development tools for GTK with this command:

bash
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential automake autoconf libtool pkg-config intltool libcurl4-openssl-dev libglib2.0-dev libevent-dev libminiupnpc-dev libgtk-3-dev libappindicator3-dev libssl-dev

Then you can begin building.

CentOS 5.4

The packages you need are:

  • gcc
  • gcc-c++
  • m4
  • make
  • automake
  • libtool
  • gettext
  • openssl-devel

Or simply run the following command:

bash
$ yum install gcc gcc-c++ m4 make automake libtool gettext openssl-devel

However, Transmission needs other packages unavailable in yum:

Before building Transmission, you need to set the pkgconfig environment setting:

bash
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

Building Transmission from Git (first time)

bash
$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/transmission/transmission Transmission
$ cd Transmission
# Use -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo to build optimized binary with debug information. (preferred)
# Use -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to build full optimized binary.
$ cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
$ cd build
$ cmake --build .
$ sudo cmake --install .

Building Transmission from Git (updating)

bash
$ cd Transmission/build
$ cmake --build . -t clean
$ git submodule foreach --recursive git clean -xfd
$ git pull --rebase --prune
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ cmake --build .
$ sudo cmake --install .

On Windows

Prerequisites

You need the following installed:

Install dependencies through vcpkg

Vcpkg will install x86 libraries by default. To install x64 add the --triplet=x64-windows flag at the end of the commands below.

Common dependencies:

bat
vcpkg install curl zlib openssl

Additional dependencies for the Qt client:

bat
vcpkg install qtactiveqt qtsvg qttools

Get Transmission source

bat
git clone https://github.com/transmission/transmission
cd transmission
git submodule update --init --recursive

Configure CMake and build the project

To configure which components are built use the flags below. Each option can be set to ON/OFF/AUTO, values shown below are the defaults.

  • -DENABLE_DAEMON=ON - build transmission daemon
  • -DENABLE_QT=AUTO - build the Qt client
  • -DENABLE_UTILS=ON - build transmission-remote, transmission-create, transmission-edit and transmission-show cli tools
  • -DENABLE_CLI=OFF - build the cli client

Other options:

  • -DUSE_QT_VERSION=6 - 5/6/AUTO choose Qt version to build with
bat
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<path-to-vcpkg>\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" <flags-from-above> <other-cmake-configurations>

To build the project run:

bat
cmake --build build