How do you set a password for transmission-daemon, the BitTorrent client server?

Do these things in the exact order:

1. Shutdown: /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon stop
2. Write the rpc-password in the /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json file, in double-quotes. Make sure rpc-authentication-required is true.
3. Save that file
4. Startup: /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start
5. Login to the page, it's at port 9091
6. Type in your password.

The password that's being overwritten is a hash. The program is smarter than usual and detects that your password is not a hash, so it overwrites the password with the hash to be secure. So your password should work.

However, remember that it writes the password it loaded with when it shuts down. So doing /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon restart will not do what you expect if you've written the file while it's running.

Genrally the daemon writes its settings when it exits (or is restarted). You can force the daemon to reload new settings by sending it SIGHUP:

kill -HUP 1234

...then it will not overwrite your settings anymore when stopping.

BTW: I'm not happy that transmission-remote-cli wants to have the password on the command line. Bad idea!

You can also try another solution to find the password:

ps -ef | grep transmission

(to my version it was admin:password1)