Can I control a qbittorrent-nox instance with CLI?

[segln]

I have an working instance of qbittorrent-nox.

I would like to upload a .torrent file to this instance through ssh only in a limited environment.

Can I do this without a third-party program?

[minhngoc25a]

You can. If you can ssh into that instance, then you can also use the command line tool sftp to transfer files. SFTP is an extension of the SSH protocol, allowing for file transfer between a local and a remote machine. Here's an excellent article from Digital Ocean on how to use it:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-sftp-to-securely-transfer-files-with-a-remote-server

[segln]

This way I can upload a file, but to "register" a Torrent file, I need to access the Web UI.
I cannot access GUI browser at all.

Is there a way to upload and register a Torrent file directly with CLI to an instance?

[minhngoc25a]

I haven't tried it yet, but you can add a .torrent file via the command line. There's a man page for this that shows you how to do it:

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/qbittorrent-nox.1.html

Note that if you're using something like Docker to run qbittorrent-nox, then you must use the command format like this to be able to execute the command directly:

docker exec -it <container_name_or_id> <command>

For your web UI problem, see if you can access it via <instance-public-ip>:<qbittorrent-port>. If you can't, then you'll need to configure the network settings on your VPS provider. If configuration is too difficult, the easiest way would be to forward a port from the remote machine to the localhost on the local machine using VSCode. Here are the steps on how to do it:

Step 1: Install VSCode and the Remote-SSH extension.
Step 2: To SSH to an instance using VSCode, read the section "Connect to a remote host" in this article: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh (If your local machine is on the latest Windows or Linux, then the SSH tools should already be present in your system, with no need for installation.)
Step 3: Forward <qbittorrent-port> to localhost. To learn how to do that, read the section "Forwarding a port / creating an SSH tunnel" in the article above. After that, you will be able to access the web UI via localhost.

[segln]

I've also seen that help and tried it, but that's not a command to control an already existing instance.
It's a command to run a new instance with a torrent file.

I've already set a reverse proxy to qbittorrent instance so there is no connection problem.

Maybe I have to send request directly with curl or something.

[minhngoc25a]

Yeah, the web UI has an API for convenience. This is the documentation:

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/WebUI-API-(qBittorrent-4.1)

You can refer to that and use cURL or other software to perform requests to administer your qbittorrent server.

[segln]

Oh! I couldn't find the help before. Thank you.
I was thinking if I should go through the web page and find the endpoint myself.