With a whole slew of new reasons on why subscribing to streaming services WILL give you worse services than NOT subscribing to them, i think it’s time to write a new up-to-date guide on how to install and configure an Arr-Stack + qBitTorrent via Docker-Compose.

0. Preamble

All these guides assume you have basic knowledge about docker & docker compose. To quickly summarize the methods here:

You either use a webui to manage your docker-compose like Dockge or you create a folder and a docker-compose.yaml for each service listed here and copy the contents of each of them into that docker-compose.yaml; IMPORTANT: You HAVE to name them docker-compose.yaml exactly like that. Do NOT name them radarr.yaml for example. After you created a docker-compose.yaml and filled it with the contents here, you simply run docker compose up -d

I specifically did NOT route all those docker-compose files through a VPN container like Gluetun. In my case i have my Mullvad VPN setup on my router directly and selected the whole server to be tunneled through that VPN.

You can add a VPN container to your setup and route all the docker compose files through that. But i will not go through this on this guide. There are guides out there how to do that and you can even ask any big enough LLM as this isn’t really that complicated.

Just as a simple run through. Install Gluetun as an additional docker container and append network_mode: "container:gluetun" at the end of every docker-compose.yaml here according to the gluetun readme. You also have to remove all the ports: sections in the docker-compose.yamls of each service because it will throw an error if you use the network_mode: and you then have to add the ports of each service into the gluetun docker-compose.yaml. You can then start a console for each docker container and check if the outside world IP adress is NOT your real one with curl ipinfo.io

For every configuration step in this guide where it says “ipofyourserver” for sonarr, radarr, etc. you will have to change that to 127.0.0.1 as they all run inside the same network of gluetun.

This is a super super quick run through and you HAVE to properly configure gluetun and run tests that stopping that container does NOT let your real IP go through.

1. Folder Structure

If you want to store all your media on a NAS or some other external drive, make sure it is configured properly for symlinking / hardlinking and that you have proper permissions for this storage. Everything here will run with the 1000 user and has to create new files to work.

So this is the folder structure i use. And it is stored on a NFS-Share coming from my TrueNAS.

arr-stack (for this example let's say it's located in /mnt/arr-stack)
	|---- media
	    |---- movies
	    |---- shows
	    |---- music
	    |---- etc.
	|---- configs
	    |---- radarr
	    |---- sonarr
	    |---- qbittorrent
	    |---- etc.
	|---- torrents
	    |---- complete

I intentionally broke out the torrent folder to make it easier accessible for when you download something fully manual and you want to grab it out of the ‘completed’ folder without searching too deep.

2. Docker-Compose Files for each service

qBitTorrent is the download application for Usenet. Alternatively you can use NZBget but i find Sab to be more modern, versatile and i just like it.

qBitTorrent

services:
  qbittorrent:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest
    container_name: qbittorrent
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - WEBUI_PORT=8081
    volumes:
      - /mnt/arr-stack/configs/qbittorrent/config:/config
      - /mnt/arr-stack/torrents/complete:/mnt/arr-stack/torrents/complete
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
      - 6881:6881
      - 6881:6881/udp
    restart: unless-stopped
networks: {}

Radarr and Sonarr are the applications that will actually find and track your Movies (Radarr) and Shows (Sonarr). Additionally there is Lidarr for Music and Whisparr for porn.

Radarr

services:
  arch-radarr:
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
    container_name: radarr
    volumes:
      - /mnt/arr-stack:/mnt/arr-stack
      - /mnt/arr-stack/configs/radarr:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
    image: binhex/arch-radarr
    restart: unless-stopped
networks: {}

Sonarr

services:
  arch-sonarr:
    ports:
      - 8989:8989
      - 9897:9897
    container_name: sonarr
    volumes:
      - /mnt/arr-stack:/mnt/arr-stack
      - /mnt/arr-stack/configs/sonarr:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
    image: binhex/arch-sonarr
    restart: unless-stopped
networks: {}

Prowlarr is the application where you can configure your usenet sites. There you will put in the URLs of your Indexers like Drunkenslug and your API keys for those sites. Prowlarr will periodically check the availability of those services and will sync these accounts to all your connected services (Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Whisparr, etc.). Prowlarr will then be doing the actual heavy lifting of accessing the API of any Usenet and search for your stuff.

Prowlarr

services:
  arch-prowlarr:
    ports:
      - 9696:9696
    container_name: prowlarr
    volumes:
      - /mnt/arr-stack/configs/prowlarr:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
    image: binhex/arch-prowlarr
    restart: unless-stopped
networks: {}

3. Configuring each service

Now that we have all these Services up and running. It’s time to properly configure them. Let’s start with qBitTorrent

3.1 qBitTorrent

1. Open the Webui with http://ipofyourserver:8081
2. Click on “Tools” in the menu bar
3. Click on Options
4. Click on Web Ui
5. Under “Authentification” change your Username and Password
6. Click on Save at the bottom

3.2 Sonarr

1. Open the Webui with http://ipofyourserver:8989
2. Click on Settings

Root Folder

1. Click on “Media Management”
2. Under Root Folders, add /mnt/arr-stack/media/shows

Connect qBitTorrent

1. Click on “Download Clients”
2. Click on the big PLUS icon
3. Select qBitTorrent
4. Enter the IP Adress of your server
5. Port: 8081
6. Enter your username and passwort from earlier
7. Under Category enter tv
8. Check “Remove Completed”
9. Click on Test and Save

Grab your API Token

1. Click on General
2. Copy API Key and save it for later. We need it for Prowlarr

3.3 Radarr

1. Open the Webui with http://ipofyourserver:7878
2. Click on Settings

Root Folder

1. Click on “Media Management”
2. Under Root Folders, add /mnt/arr-stack/media/movies

Connect qBitTorrent

1. Click on “Download Clients”
2. Click on the big PLUS icon
3. Select qBitTorrent
4. Enter the IP Adress of your server
5. Port: 8081
6. Enter your username and passwort from earlier
7. Under Category enter tv
8. Check “Remove Completed”
9. Click on Test and Save

Grab your API Token

1. Click on General
2. Copy API Key and save it for later. We need it for Prowlarr

The same procedure goes for Lidarr and Whisparr aswell with their respective categories changed.

3.4 Prowlarr

1. Open the Webui with http://ipofyourserver:9696
2. Click on Settings

Connect Sonarr and Radarr

1. Click on Apps
2. Click on the big Plus Icon
3. Click on Sonarr
4. Sync Level “Full Sync”
5. Tags: none
6. Prowlarr Server: http://localhost:9696
7. Sonarr Server: http://ipofyourserver:8989
8. API Key from Sonarr
9. Test and Save
10. Rinse and Repeat for Radarr with adjusted infos

Add Indexers

1. Click on Indexers
2. Click on Add Indexer
3. Type in the name of your indexer. Many of the big ones will be pre configures
4. Example: The Pirate Bay
5. Click on the entry
6. Check “Enable”
7. Sync Profile “Standard”
8. Under Base URL select the first one (you may have to cycle through if one of them doesn’t work)
9. Enter your Seed Ratio
10. Test and Save

Prowlarr will now test and sync the indexers to your other apps like Sonarr and Radarr. Manually click on Test all Inders and then on Sync all Indexers. Now go back to Sonarr and Radarr and click on Settings -> Indexers and check if Drunkenslug (in our example) shows up there.

4. You’re done

Now this is obviously just the tip of the iceberg. You still don’t have “finetuned” profiles and explaining these would absolutely blow up the scope of this post.

I highly recommend you to check out these two posts over on the trash-guides site: Sonarr Profiles and Radarr Profiles

So, these are the basics and there is much more to finetune. But you absolutely are ready to go sailing on the high seas now!

If you’re looking for a neat mobile app to manage your sonarr, radarr and sabnzbd i highly recommend you check out nzb360.

Here is an alternate guide on how to set it up for Usenet Downloads: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26287096

Part 2 of this Guide is aiming for Jellyfin + Jellyseer: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26296377

• /mnt/arr-stack/torrents/complete:/mnt/arr-stack/torrents/complete