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 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

On Unix

Prerequisites

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.

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 python3

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 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 qt5-tools qt5-winextras

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 or OFF, 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

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