Torrent Machine and Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi

This project is a collection of guidelines and tutorials explaining how to create a fully autonomous torrent machine and Plex Media Server out of a Raspberry Pi.

General Notes

Operative System

I execute the following commands on a new installation of Raspbian 9. As an editor I use vim, that I installed after the first boot with:

$ sudo apt-get install vim-nox

Hardware

I used for this tutorial a Raspberry Pi 3B. Using a fresh Raspbian install and default settings I could not get the device to work for more than 20 minutes consecutively without freezing.

The Raspberry Pi 3 suffers apparently from problems due to voltage and heating. Therefore I tweaked settings and it stopped hanging.

1. Settings for Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B

Requirements

1. A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian, connected to the internet, whose intranet IP is known - the installation of Raspbian is out of scope.
2. An external USB Drive.
3. A private VPN account.

For this tutorial I used:

1. 1 Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B (Linux raspberrypi 4.14.52-v7+ & Raspbian 9)
2. Static IP address for the Raspberry Pi (192.168.0.10)
3. 1 Trascend StoreJet 25M3 (2 TB) formatted with ExFAT
4. 1 PureVPN premium account

Pre-requisites

Prepare your Raspberry Pi

Make sure that your Raspberry Pi has the latest updates installed:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Connect the external USB drive

I referred to the following table to determine the best suited filesystem for my network:

File System	Windows XP	Windows 7/8/10	macOS (10.6.4 and earlier)	macOS (10.6.5 and later)	Ubuntu Linux	Playstation 4	Xbox 360/One
NTFS	Yes	Yes	Read Only	Read Only	Yes	No	No/Yes
FAT32	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes/Yes
exFAT	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes (with ExFAT packages)	Yes (with MBR, not GUID)	No/Yes
HFS+	No	(read-only with Boot Camp)	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
APFS	No	No	No	Yes (macOS 10.13 or greater)	No	No	No
EXT 2, 3, 4	No	Yes (with third-party software)	No	No	Yes	No	Yes

I decided to use ExFAT since I only work with Mac OS and Linux.

1. Connect an ExFAT USB Drive

Transmission BitTorrent

Set-Up and Configuration

Execute the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install -y transmission-daemon transmission-cli transmission-common

And stop the demon to apply changes to the configuration that will allow you to manage Transmission remotely:

$ sudo service transmission-daemon stop
$ sudo vi /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Look for rpc-whitelist and rpc-whitelist-enabled and make sure they look like this:

"rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*",
"rpc-whitelist-enable": "true",

Please note that this is assuming that your internal network works on 192.16.0.1/24. If otherwise please change the value accordingly.

Also, you can modify download-dir and incomplete-dir to point at the external USB drive, for example:

"download-dir": "/media/storage/downloads",
"incomplete-dir": "/media/storage/.tmp",

Please make sure that the directories exists on your external USB drive.

Once you are done you can restart the Transmission service:

$ sudo service transmission-daemon start

Set-Up the Web Interface

The web interface is already available at the address http://192.168.0.10:9091 (replace the IP address with the one used by the Raspberry Pi in your network).

You can login using transmission as both username and password.

OPTIONAL: Set-Up a VPN

Make sure that the Raspberry Pi connects to your preferred VPN on start-up.

1. Configure PureVPN

OPTIONAL: Set-Up RSS Support

If you want to automate even further your flow, by having Transmission downloading your favourite videos via an RSS feed, you can install Transmission-RSS.

Dependencies

The easiest is to install Transmission-RSS via gem. We will need a few packages to do so:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev

We also need gem's bundler:

$ sudo gem install bundler

Installation

Now we download the latest version of Transmission-RSS:

$ git clone https://github.com/nning/transmission-rss

We enter the main directoy, we bundle it, and we build:

$ cd transmission-rss/
$ bundle
$ sudo gem build transmission-rss.gemspec

and finally, we install it:

$ sudo gem install transmission-rss-*.gem

Configuration

According to the README, I was supposed to find a configuration file (/etc/transmission-rss.conf), but it didn't exist. So I created it and put some basic parameters:

feeds:
        - url: http://link_to_my_rss_feed

update_interval: 600

add_paused: false

server:
        host: localhost
        port: 9091
        rpc_path: /transmission/rpc

login:
        username: transmission
        password: transmission

log:
        target: /var/log/transmissiond-rss.log
        level: debug

privileges:
        user: root
        group: root

client:
        timeout: 5

fork: false

pid_file: false

seen_file: ~/.config/transmission/seen

Please note that the config file cannot contain any TAB, but only spaces. Therefore, if your editor is automatically indenting sub-options please verify that indentations only contain spaces. Any TAB will prevent Transmission-RSS from launching, throwing an error (e.g. "found character that cannot start any token").

Launching at Startup

To have Transmission-RSS starting at boot, we can create a service. Create /etc/systemd/system/transmission-rss.service and paste the following inside:

[Unit]
Description=Transmission RSS daemon.
After=network.target transmission-daemon.service

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -f
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

To have the service launched at boot:

$ sudo systemctl enable transmission-rss

Optional: Sanity Check

If you reboot now, you should have:

1. Your VPN (if configured) via OpenVPN
2. Transmission
3. Transmission-RSS

launching at boot. Running the command:

$ ps xuaw | grep 'openvpn\|transmission'

You should see the three running:

root       401  5.1  0.5   8640  5388 ?        Ss   15:00   1:45 /usr/sbin/openvpn --daemon ovpn-purevpn --status /run/openvpn/purevpn.status 10 --cd /etc/openvpn --config /etc/openvp /purevpn.conf --writepid /run/openvpn/purevpn.pid
debian-+   536  4.0  2.1 101268 20424 ?        Ssl  15:00   1:21 /usr/bin/transmission-daemon -f --log-error
root       563  0.0  2.2  40436 21596 ?        Sl   15:00   0:00 /usr/bin/ruby2.3 /usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -f

Plex Media Server

Installation

To install Plex Media Server we need to add a new repository and it's key:

$ wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ echo "deb https://dev2day.de/pms/ stretch main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list

We can now update our package list and install Plex Media Server:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver-installer

Configuration

The configuration is stored in /etc/default/plexmediaserver.prev

We need to change the user the server run with from plex to the user that you are logging in with (pi by default):

PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USER=pi

and we can reboot:

$ sudo reboot

Initial Setup

You can complete the setup opening the following link with your browser:

http://192.168.0.10:32400/web/

Don't forget to replace the IP with the one that your Raspberry Pi is using in your network.

When you are requested to add libraries, you should add the download folder of Transmission, in our example /media/storage/downloads.

Optional: Convert Videos to Avoid Transcoding

Check this page.