How can I change the cache directory?

[bbergeron0]

I want to manage qbittorent-nox as a daemon, and I want it to use /var/cache/qBittorrent instead of ~/.cache/qBittorrent. How would I do that?

[ozkutuk]

I have found myself looking for the same thing, and from what I can see it is not possible to configure the individual directories for cache, config etc. However, qbittorrent-nox provides the --profile flag which allows the user to specify a base directory within which the directories like cache, config, etc. are created (relevant code for the curious). Therefore, you can run the qbittorrent-nox like so:

qbittorrent-nox --profile=/var/lib

This is what I did within my systemd service. Still not as good as having the cache in /var/cache/qBittorrent, but at least the service doesn't try to write to ~/.cache anymore, but to /var/lib/qBittorrent/cache. Hope that helps.

[m000]

@bbergeron0 AFAIK, qBittorrent respects the XDG Base Directory Specification. Have you tried setting XDG_CACHE_HOME=/var/cache in your environment?

[Valloric]

As you've discovered, --profile= is a trap option because it puts everything in that path. Instead, put the following environment variables in your systemd service (probably in a drop-in file):

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/qbittorrent-nox
Environment=XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/etc/torrent
Environment=XDG_STATE_HOME=/var/lib/torrent
Environment=XDG_DATA_HOME=/var/lib/torrent
Environment=XDG_CACHE_HOME=/var/cache/torrent
# These three systemd properties manage the lifecycle of the above listed paths
ConfigurationDirectory=torrent 
StateDirectory=torrent
CacheDirectory=torrent

The above config assumes you want to use torrent for the folder names. You can, of course, use any other name.

Using the XDG environment variables works because qBittorrent uses QStandardPaths from the Qt Framework to get the paths for config, state and cache directories and Qt will read the XDG environment variables as per the XDG Base Directory Specification.