Environment Variables

Environmental variables are used in Transmission to enable some debugging information and to override its default behavior.

Transmission-Specific Variables

• If TRANSMISSION_HOME is set, Transmission will look there for its settings instead of in the default location.

• If TRANSMISSION_WEB_HOME is set, Transmission will look there for the WebUI's files, such as the javascript, html, and graphics files.

• If TR_CURL_VERBOSE is set, debugging information for libcurl will be enabled. More information about libcurl's debugging mode ​is available here.

• If TR_DEBUG_FD is set to an integer, that integer is treated as a ​file descriptor and very verbose debugging information is written to it. For example, here is how to turn on debugging and save it to a file named "runlog" when running Transmission from a bash shell:

  $ export TR_DEBUG_FD=2
  $ transmission 2>runlog
  

Standard Variables Used By Transmission

• If TRANSMISSION_WEB_HOME is not set, non-Mac platforms will look for the Web UI's files in XDG_DATA_HOME and in the directories in XDG_DATA_DIRS as described in ​the XDG Base Directory Specification. If XDG_DATA_HOME is not set, its default value is $HOME/.local/share/.

• If TRANSMISSION_HOME is not set, Unix-based versions of Transmission will look for their settings in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/transmission/. If XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, its default value is $HOME/.config/.

• If HOME is set, it's used in three ways:
  1. by the XDG variables, as described above
  2. If TRANSMISSION_HOME is not set, Mac-based versions of Transmission will look for their settings in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Transmission
  3. $HOME/Downloads is the default download directory.