Tl;dr: I understand docker is supposed to help get things running on different systems easily, can someone give me a copy of their working Arr stack?

Frustrated venting I’m past being new to this server thing having run mine for over a year so I guess I can officially say I’m just bad at it. I’ve been working on getting Sonarr, Radarr, and, lidarr running since 4 in the afternoon, discounting dinner that’s 6 hours of constantly failing to get these to work. This is my 5th time trying since I learned about it in April.

I’ve given up on the automatic downloads, I’ve given up on the request system, I’m even done with the torrenting, I’ll just do that on my phone. All I want is something that format my 5TB of media to Title (date) instead of MOVIE_TITLE_ALL_UNDERSCORE, or TB_1000, or movie.videoformat.year.special.deluxe.username.host.visit.my.site.please. I was sold on this idea that self hosting was a relatively easy thing that anyone can get into and while I have a good understanding of how a config.yml is supposed to look and work, and I’ve got a decent understanding of ssh and sftp between two computers, but trying to grt any one of these things to run is soul crushing. I literally work in the foster system and my worst cases do not give me the stress this does. I just want to get it fixed so I can watch Pokemon with my family and offer it to people who will never bother to log on.

Edit: OMFG I moved them back into individual folders and they work now. 6 hours of videos and tutorials and not a single thing saying they absolutely have to be in their own folders or it won’t work. edit unclear, brain stuck in toaster

Edit 2: turns out, Radarr can’t find movies at /movies/movie.mkv and needs /movies/folder/movie.mkv. Now Radarr can import movies but all other problems persist.

  • tyler@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    Ah ok this is the comment that needs to be in the main post. First things first:

    You aren’t ‘installing’ radarr, sonarr, etc into any directories. They are containers, essentially entire operating systems located in a hidden folder on your server. You don’t ever touch these things directly, you only use docker commands to interface with them. There’s two ways to do that. Either directly running docker (docker run linuxserver:radarr -p blah blah blah) or with a docker compose (docker compose up). The docker compose way is the ‘easy’ way to do it (actually the easiest is just using unraid and clicking install, but we’ll ignore that since so many people are telling you a billion ways to do things). Docker compose means you can specify all of your applications in a single file, and how they interact with each other. You will run one command to start all of them at once. And then they will read from whatever folders you configure in the service. This might be a bit confusing because up above you might see other people’s docker compose files and they specify things like this:

      sonarr:
    container_name: sonarr
    network_mode: "service:gluetun"
    image: ghcr.io/hotio/sonarr:latest
    volumes:
      - /mnt/drive/volumes/sonarr/config:/config
      - /mnt/nas/TV:/mnt/TV
      - /mnt/nas/Downloads:/downloads
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    depends_on:
      - gluetun
    restart: 'unless-stopped'

    and you would think that they’re configuring the sonarr locations for their tv and downloads, etc. But that is not what is happening. They are simply mapping a local path /mnt/nas/TV to a path inside of the sonarr operating system /mnt/TV. This means that in Sonarr, in the web interface, you would configure the path /mnt/TV, NOT the path /mnt/nas/TV. You still have to configure EVERYTHING in the services themselves. All that docker is doing is setting up the operating system. Think of it like this, on a regular computer you can map network drives to letters like A, B, C, etc right? Well that’s exactly what you’re doing in docker, mapping ‘network’ (actually your main operating system) folders, to folders in the remote operating system (the one running in docker).

    In regards to having radarr rename things, you can have it do that, but you have to get the directory structure set up first, and you can run scripts to have nzbget or sabnzbd move things around for you. The experts on discord would be a much better help than most of us here I think, since they are all the devs on the project.