Sonarr / Radarr / Bazarr / Jackett / Transmission / Plex
Sonarr and Radarr Will automatically take care of analyzing existing episodes, seasons and movies. It compares what you have on disk with the release schedule, and triggers download for missing files. It also takes care of upgrading your existing files if a better quality matching your criterias is available out there.
When the download is over the file to the appropriate location
(/tv/show-name/season-1/01-title.mp4) or (/movies/movie-name/title.mp4) and renames the file if needed.
Sonarr and Radarr can both download files from Torrents
Files are searched automatically by Sonarr/Radarr through a list of indexers that you have to configure. Indexers are APIs that allow searching for particular releases organized by categories. Think browsing the Pirate Bay programmatically. This is a pretty common feature for newsgroups indexers that respect a common API (called Newznab).
However this common protocol does not really exist for torrent indexers. That's why we'll be using another tool called Jackett. You can consider it as a local proxy API for the most popular torrent indexers. It searches and parse information from heterogeneous websites.
The best release matching your criteria is selected by Sonarr/Radarr (eg. non-blacklisted 1080p release with enough seeds). Then the download is passed on to another set of tools.
Sonarr and Radarr are plugged to downloaders for:
- Transnmission handles torrent download.
Both are daemons coming with a nice Web UI, making them perfect candidates for being installed on a server. Sonarr & Radarr already have integration with them, meaning they rely on each service API to pass on downloads, request download status and handle finished downloads.
Both are very standard and popular tools. I'm using them for their integration with Sonarr/Radarr but also as standalone downloaders for everything else.
Plex Media Server organize all your medias as libraries. You can set up one for TV shows and another one for movies. It automatically grabs metadata for each new release (description, actors, images, release date).
Plex keeps track of your position in the entire library: what episode of a given TV show season you've watched, what movie you've not watched yet, what episode was added to the library since last time. It also remembers where you stopped within a video file. Basically you can pause a movie in your bedroom, then resume playback from another device in your bathroom.
Plex comes with clients in a lot of different systems (Web UI, Linux, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Android TV, Chromecast, PS4, Smart TV, etc.) that allow you to display and watch all your shows/movies in a nice Netflix-like UI.
The server has transcoding abilities: it automatically transcodes video quality if needed (eg. stream your 1080p movie in 480p if watched from a mobile with low bandwidth).
Downloaders:
- Tranmission: torrent downloader with a web UI
- Jackett: API to search torrents from multiple indexers
Download orchestration:
- Sonarr: manage TV show, automatic downloads, sort & rename
- Radarr: basically the same as Sonarr, but for movies
Media Center:
- Plex: media center server with streaming transcoding features, useful plugins and a beautiful UI. Clients available for a lot of systems (Linux/OSX/Windows, Web, Android, Chromecast, Android TV, etc.)
The idea is to set up all these components as Docker containers in a docker-compose.yml file.
We'll reuse community-maintained images (special thanks to linuxserver.io for many of them).
I'm assuming you have some basic knowledge of Linux and Docker.
The stack is not really plug-and-play. You'll see that manual human configuration is required for most of these tools. Configuration is not fully automated (yet?), but is persisted on reboot. Some steps also depend on external accounts that you need to set up yourself (usenet indexers, torrent indexers, vpn server, plex account, etc.). We'll walk through it.
See the official instructions to install Docker.
Also install docker-compose (see the official instructions).
This tutorial will guide you along the full process of making your own docker-compose file and configuring every app within it, however, to prevent errors or to reduce your typing, you can also use the general-purpose docker-compose file provided in this repository.
- First,
git clone https://github.com/garethhallnz/media-center.gitinto a directory. This is where you will run the full setup from (note: this isn't the same as your media directory). I you don't have git then just download and uncompress the zip file. - Rename the
.env.samplefile included in the repo to.env. - Continue this guide, and the docker-compose file snippets you see are already ready for you to use. You'll still need to manually configure your
.envfile and other manual configurations.
For each of these images, there is some unique configuration that needs to be done. Instead of editing the docker-compose file to hardcode these values in, we'll instead put these values in a .env file. A .env file is a file for storing environment variables that can later be accessed in a general-purpose docker-compose.yml file, like the example one in this repository.
Here is an example of what your .env file should look like, use values that fit for your own setup.
# Your timezone, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
TZ=Pacific/Auckland
PUID=1000
PGID=1000
# The directory where data and configuration will be stored.
PATH_TV=/hd3/tv
PATH_MOVIES=/hd1/movies
PATH_DOWNLOADS=/downloadsThings to notice:
- TZ is based on your tz time zone.
- The PUID and PGID are your user's ids. Find them with
id $USER. - This file should be in the same directory as your
docker-compose.ymlfile so the values can be read in.
Then run the container with docker-compose up -d.
Tranmission web UI is available on port 9091 localhost:9091
Jackett web UI is available on port 9117 localhost:9117
Plex web UI should be available at localhost:32400/web
Sonarr web UI is available on port 8989 localhost:6789
In Media Management, you can choose to rename episodes automatically. This is a very nice feature I've been using for a long time.
In profiles you can set new quality profiles, default ones are fairly good. There is an important option at the bottom of the page: do you want to give priority to Usenet or Torrents for downloading episodes?
Indexers is the important tab: that's where Sonarr will grab information about released episodes.
For torrents indexers, I activate Torznab custom indexers that point to my local Jackett service. This allows searches across all torrent indexers configured in Jackett. You have to configure them one by one though.
Get torrent indexers Jackett proxy URLs by clicking Copy Torznab Feed in Jackett Web UI. Use the global Jackett API key as authentication.
Download Clients tab is where we'll configure links with our two download clients i.e. Transmission or other.
Enable Advanced Settings, and tick Remove in the Completed Download Handling section. This tells Sonarr to remove torrents from tranmission once processed.
In Connect tab, we'll configure Sonarr to send notifications to Plex when a new episode is ready:
Note: You may need to chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/root/directory so Sonarr and the rest of the apps have the proper permissions to modify and move around files. This Docker image of Sonarr uses an internal user account inside the container called abc some you may have to set this user as owner of the directory where it will place the media files after download. This note also applies for Radarr.
Radarr web UI is available on port 7878 localhost:7878
Radarr is a fork of Sonarr, made for movies instead of TV shows. So setup just like Sonarr
One issue that might creep up is that docker will reserve the HDD mount before the OS mounts it. This is even true if you have specified the HDD to auto mount.
To fix this is it's recommended to mount the HDD using fstab.
Say your hd is called hd1 and it's internal; that means it will be mounted at /media/$USER/hd1 what happens is docker starts and mount attemps to mount /media/$USER/hd1 (as specified in the .env file). Since the OS still has not mounted the HDD docker reserves the name and the OS mounts in as /media/$USER/hd11 therefore the mount in docker is now incorrect.
- Create a directory to mount your HDD to
sudo mkdir /hd1- Find you disk
sudo fdisk -lYou should see some like
Disk /dev/sdb: 2.73 TiB, 3000592982016 bytes, 5860533168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD30EFRX-68E
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: AD7443B6-2372-4D65-8451-875DC4AD9B25
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 5860532223 5860530176 2.7T Linux filesystem
Take note of the "Device" FYI you can also get this detail out of the "Disks" UI app.
- Add the device to fstab
sudo vim /ets/fstab # can also use nano or viAnd add following to the end of the file:
/dev/sdb1 /hd1 ext4 defaults 0 0
- Mount the HDD
sudo mount /hd1-
Find your sornarr apikey and copy it Go to sonarr > setting > general Look in the Security section
-
Setup a cron job to run every 10 min
crontab -eThen add to following ar the bottom of the file (replacing the API-KEY)
*/10 * * * * curl -XPOST -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '{"name": "ImportListSync"}' 'http://localhost:8989/api/v3/command?apikey=API-KEY' > /dev/null 2>&1