transmission/docs/Building-Transmission.md

5.4 KiB

Getting the Source

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

On macOS

Software prerequisites:

  • macOS 10.14.4 or newer
  • Xcode 11.3.1 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 ninja

Build the app:

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

Building the GTK app with ninja

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
ninja -C build transmission-gtk
./build/gtk/transmission-gtk

On Unix

Prerequisites

Debian 11 / Bullseye

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 git build-essential cmake libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev

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

For GTK 3 client, two additional packages are required

$ sudo apt install libgtkmm-3.0-dev gettext

For QT client, one additional package is needed on top of basic dependencies

$ sudo apt install qttools5-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

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:

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 https://github.com/transmission/transmission Transmission
$ cd Transmission
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ # Use -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo to build optimized binary.
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
$ make
$ sudo make install

Building Transmission from Git (updating)

$ cd Transmission/build
$ make clean
$ git pull --rebase --prune
$ git submodule update --recursive
$ # Use -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo to build optimized binary.
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
$ make
$ sudo make install

On Windows

For Windows XP and above there are several choices:

Cygwin environment

With Cygwin https://cygwin.com/ installed, the CLI tools (transmission-remote, transmission-cli, etc.) and the daemon can be built easily.

No patches needed(*), all the recent versions of Transmission build almost out-of-the-box (you need to install the prerequisites), and the CLI tools work better under Cygwin than those built with MinGW.

(*) At the release time of version 2.0, libevent is not bundled and it is also not in the Cygwin distribution (but was added later)... so you need to build it (which is as easy as ./configure, make install). To build Transmission you may need to add LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" to the configure script (LIBEVENT_LIBS does not seem to work when it comes to build all the test programs). Additionally libutp needs deleting -ansi on the Makefile.

With version 2.51 miniupnpc fails to build, see https://miniupnp.tuxfamily.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t#1130.

Version 2.80 breaks building on Cygwin, adding this https://github.com/adaptivecomputing/torque/blob/master/src/resmom/cygwin/quota.h file to Cygwin's /usr/include/sys solves the problem. This is no longer needed after version 2.82 (Cygwin added the header).

Version 2.81 with the above workaround needs a one line patch, see ticket #5692.

Version 2.82, same as 2.81.

Version 2.83, no need to add quota.h, Cygwin added it.

Native Windows

With a MinGW https://mingw.org/ development environment, the GTK and the Qt GUI applications can be built. The CLI tools can also be built and in general work fine, but may fail if you use foreign characters as parameters (MinGW uses latin1 for parameters).

The procedure is documented at Building Transmission Qt on Windows.