transmission/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 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:

• 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 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

Building transmission-daemon

You need the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2019 or greater (the Community Edition is sufficient - just make sure its C++ compiler, MSVC, is installed)
• CMake (choose to add CMake to your path)
• Git for Windows
• Vcpkg

Install all dependencies through vcpkg

vcpkg integrate install
vcpkg install curl
vcpkg install zlib
vcpkg install openssl

Get Transmission source and build it

git clone https://github.com/transmission/transmission
cd transmission
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="$($VCPKG_ROOT)\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake"
cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo