Transmission: Automatically Monitor A Directory For New Torrent Files [How To]

Transmission, the default torrent client that comes with Ubuntu, allows you to monitor a directory for newly added torrent files. This feature can be used to automatically start a torrent download as soon as you add the the torrent file to the Watch Directory.

However, the Watch Dir option is disabled by default so to enable it, you must edit the settings.json file:

vim ~/.config/transmission/settings.json

The above command will open the settings.json in vim text editor.

To activate the Watch Dir, you need to set the watch-dir-enabled option to true:

"watch-dir-enabled": true

You can also specify the Watch Directory's location using the watch-dir option

"watch-dir": "/home/USERNAME/PATH_TO_DIR",

Save the settings.json file, then start Transmission to test your settings.

Alternative method:

You can achieve the same result using the GTK+ interface. To do that, go to:

Edit ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Automatically add torrents from

Activate the Automatically add torrents from option, and then choose the Watch Directory path from the dropdown menu.

NOTE: This post is actually an introduction to a series of tutorials that I will be making in the coming days. This series will cover some neat stuff such as using FlexGet and crontab to automate/schedule tasks such as downloading torrents using RSS feeds.