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.

You can also try another solution to find the password:

ps -ef | grep transmission

(to my version it was admin:password1)

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!