A brief documentation to how dbGaP website is accessed & how to download data.
Visit dbGaP, click on Controlled Access Data, then login with your eRA Commons account. You'll see the dataset previously applied for and approved under the tab Authorized Access -> My Requests. In the column Actions click Request Files for the dataset you want to download, then click / select data file names. After all is done, create the data request and wait for an email.
In my case, I'd use the Request for Exchange Area data, and go to Provisional files. Currently version 7 (V7) is more or less ready for analysis (QC completed). The manifest of dataset I requested can be found here.
Update: Sept 24, 2017 there is V8 eQTL release.
gtex/exchange/GTEx_phs000424/exchange/analysis_releases/GTEx_Analysis_2017-06-05_v8/eqtlEmail received from dbGaP should contain a link to download instruction page. It requires ascp command tool to download and sra toolkit to decode the data.
ascp -QTr -l 500M -k 1 -i `pwd`/.asperaweb_id_dsa.openssh -W ... dbtest@gap-upload.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:data/instant/... .
vdb-decrypt --decrypt-sra-files variant_calls/* -v
vdb-decrypt --decrypt-sra-files sample_annotations/* -v
vdb-decrypt --decrypt-sra-files rna-seq/* -v
...Where a file .asperaweb_id_dsa.openssh is required (this file can be found on midway where I store the downloaded data).