Installing Radarr: Your Personal Movie Collection Manager

Radarr in Proxmox LXC!!!

In the previous article, we delved into the step-by-step process of installing Koel in our Home Lab.

Now, we turn our focus to another indispensable application for movie enthusiasts — Radarr.

What is Radarr?

Radarr is an open-source application designed to automate the process of finding, downloading, and organizing movies in your personal collection. It operates as a personal movie manager, making it easy to keep your library updated with the latest releases. Radarr seamlessly integrated with various download clients and media servers, providing a streamlined and user-friendly experience. Whether you’re at home or on the go, Radarr ensures your movie collection is always up-to-date and easily accessible.

Key features of Radarr include:

1. Automated Movie Downloads
2. Customizable Movie Lists
3. Integration with Multiple Download Clients
4. Continuous Monitoring for New Releases
5. Flexible and User-Friendly Interface

Disclaimer: Legal and Ethical Considerations

Before delving into the installation and usage of Radarr, it’s crucial to emphasize the importance of adhering to legal and ethical standards. Torrenting copyrighted material without proper authorization is illegal in many jurisdictions and can lead to severe consequences. Respect the terms and conditions of Usenet indexers and ensure compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.

Our guide on Radarr is intended solely for educational purposes, assuming users will engage in lawful and ethical activities. We do not endorse or encourage any illegal or unethical behavior, including the unauthorized sharing or downloading of copyrighted material.

Steps to install Radarr:

• Before proceeding we need a few information to be obtained which we’ll be using in the further steps. We can quickly fire up a terminal and connect to the LXC via SSH or connect via Proxmox Console.
• We need to find out the Process User ID (PUID) and Process Group ID (PGID) of the user from which we’ll be deploying this stack. These variables specify the user and group ownership for processes running inside the Docker containers.
• In our case, these values are used to ensure that the files created or modified by Radarr running in the container are owned by the specific user and group on the LXC. We can type in the below command to find the same.

id <username>

• Now, we’ll be using Portainer Stack to install Radarr in our Home Lab. First, let us log in to our Portainer instance and then head to our local docker instance by clicking on the local option.

• Here we can use the Stack option to deploy our Radarr instance using our docker-compose file. Let’s click on the Stacks option.

• We can click on the Add Stack button on the top right to create a new stack.

• We can give the name of the stack and then copy and paste the below docker-compose file of our Radarr instance. Feel free to make changes to the file based on your needs.

version: '3.8'
services:
  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr
    hostname: radarr
    environment:
      - PUID=3000
      - PGID=3000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - radarr_config:/config
      - /home/admin/NFS/Downloads:/downloads
      - /home/admin/NFS/Movies:/data/movies
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
    restart: always
volumes:
  radarr_config:

• In the above compose file, we will be creating a volume to store all our Radarr configuration files. Also, I have mapped the same download folder that I have used in our qBittorent installation as all our downloads will be done by qBittorrent.
• Also, I have mapped the folder where currently all my movies are and will be stored after the download gets completed.

• Once done we can click on the Deploy the Stack button to deploy our Radarr instance.

• We can see that the stack has been successfully created. On viewing it, we can see that our Radarr instance has been successfully installed and the container has started running.

We have successfully installed the Radarr instance on our Home Lab. We can check out our installation now.

Configuring Radarr:

• First, we need to head to the Radarr login page. By default, the admin login would reside on port 7878. We can type in the IP Address:7878 to open the same.

• We will be greeted with the above screen. Here we need to enable authentication so that Radarr would require a login when we try to access it, for security.

• Upon filling up the details, we can click on the Save button to save the authentication details.

• We now can add our required indexers from which we will be able to request and manage our content easily.
• Since we have already installed Prowlarr, we will be connecting our Radarr instance to Prowlarr so that Radarr can take the indexers directly from Prowlarr instead of managing them separately.

Connecting Radarr and Prowlarr:

• We can click on the Settings option in the left side menu and head to the General tab.

• Here we can copy the API Key that is shown. We will be using this API Key in our Prowlarr instance to connect both of them. Once done the indexers in Prowlarr will sync automatically in Radarr.
• Now we can head over to our Prowlarr instance and login to the same.
• Once after login, we can head to the Settings Option and click on the Apps tab to connect our Radarr instance.

• We can click on the + button to connect our Radarr instance.

• Here, we can click on the Radarr option.
• Now we can type in our Prowlarr instance URL and our Radarr instance URL. We can also paste the API Key that we just copied.

• Once done, we can click on the Test button to test if our connection works fine. If the connection is successful, we can click on the Save button to save our configuration.

• We can see that our configuration has been saved successfully.

• Back in our Radarr instance, we can see that the indexers that are available in our Prowlarr instance have been synced up automatically once after connection.

We have now successfully connected our Radarr and our Prowlarr instances.

Connecting Radarr and qBittorrent:

So far we have successfully installed Radarr in our Home Lab and have configured and connected it to our Prowlarr instance as well. We now need to connect our Radarr instance with our qBittorrent instance so that we can download our fetched content. This can be done by following the below steps:

• In our Radarr instance, we can click on the Settings option on the left-hand side menu and head to the Download Clients tab.

• In this screen, we will be able to configure all our download clients. We can click on the + option to proceed further.

• Here, we have support for various download clients. We can select the download client whichever we have installed already. Since we have already deployed qBittorrent, I’ll just click on the qBittorrent option.

• We now need to fill in the details of our qBittorrent instance.
• Upon filling in the details, we can click on the Test button to test our configuration if it works.
• We can now click on the Save button to save our qBittorrent details.

• We have successfully configured qBittorrent as a download client for our Radarr instance. We now will be able to easily download all our content.

Managing Contents:

We have successfully installed Radarr, configured Prowlarr as our indexer manager and also added qBittorrent as our download client. We can try downloading content just to check if all our configuration works properly.

• We can head to the Movies option in the left-hand side menu in our Radarr instance and click on the Add New button.

• Here at the top, we can see the Search box. I’ll just search for a movie here.

• Using the indexer configured in Prowlarr, Radarr lists all the possible contents for the query that we just searched.
• We can now click on the content that we searched for.

• We can select the quality profile that we need and some other options. Upon changing we can click on the Add Movie button to start downloading the content.
• Since we have configured qBittorrent as our download client, we will be able to see the content getting downloaded in the qBittorrent instance upon logging into the same.

• Here we can see that it is getting downloaded upon hitting the Add Movie button. Hence we can confirm all our configurations are working properly.

We have now successfully installed and configured our Radarr instance. We also connected Prowlarr as our indexer manager and added our qBittorrent instance as our download client. We also have tested our configuration by trying to download.

In this article, we have explored Radarr and went into the step-by-step process of deploying the same in our Home Lab.

In the next article, we will be looking into another server that we will be deploying in our Home Lab. Stay tuned for more detailed instructions on expanding our Home Labbing capabilities.

Happy Homelabbing!!!

Originally published on: https://harish2k01.in/installing-radarr-your-personal-movie-collection-manager/