transmission-mirror/docs/Building-Transmission.md

Getting the Source

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

On macOS

Software prerequisites:

• macOS 11.0 or newer
• Xcode 12.5.1 or newer

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

$ 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.

$ 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:

$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-3.0-dev

GTK 4 client:

$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-4.0-dev

Qt5 client:

$ sudo apt install libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev

Qt6 client:

$ 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:

$ 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.

$ 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:

$ sudo apt install gettext libgtkmm-3.0-dev

Qt5 client:

$ sudo apt install libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev

Qt6 client:

$ 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:

$ 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:

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

However, Transmission needs other packages unavailable in yum:

• pkg-config
• libcurl
• intltool

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

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

Building Transmission from Git (first time)

$ 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)

$ 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:

• Visual Studio 2019 or greater (the Community Edition is sufficient)
  • install the "Desktop Development with C++" workload
  • install the ATL and MFC components (only needed by the Qt client)
• CMake (choose to add CMake to your path)
• Git for Windows
• Vcpkg
• Python

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:

vcpkg install curl zlib openssl

Additional dependencies for the Qt client:

vcpkg install qtsvg qttools

Get Transmission source

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

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<path-to-vcpkg>\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" <flags-from-above> <other-cmake-configurations>

To build the project run:

cmake --build build