Installing Sonarr: Your Ultimate TV Show Management Tool

Sonarr in Proxmox LXC!

In our previous article, we explored the installation and configuration of Radarr, an indispensable tool for movie enthusiasts.

Now, let’s shift our focus to another essential application for TV show enthusiasts — Sonarr.

What is Sonarr?

Sonarr is an open-source application designed to help us organize and manage our TV show library with ease. Like Radarr, Sonarr automates the process of finding, downloading, and organizing TV shows, ensuring that our collection is always up-to-date. With seamless integration with various download clients and media servers, Sonarr provides a streamlined and user-friendly experience.

Key features of Sonarr:

1. Automated TV Show Downloads
2. Customizable Show Lists
3. Integration with Multiple Download Clients
4. Continuous Monitoring for New Release
5. User-Friendly Interface

Disclaimer: Legal and Ethical Considerations

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

Our guide on Sonarr 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 Sonarr:

• 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 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 Docker containers.
• In our case, these values are used to ensure that the files created or modified by Sonarr 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>

Note: Replace <username> with the name of the user from which the stack will be deployed

• Now, we’ll be using Portainer Stack to install Sonarr 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 Sonarr 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 Sonarr instance. Feel free to make changes to the file based on your needs.

version: '3.8'
services:
  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    hostname: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - sonarr_config:/config
      - /home/admin/NFS/Downloads:/downloads
      - /home/admin/NFS/Shows:/data/shows
    ports:
      - 8989:8989
    restart: always
volumes:
  sonarr_config:

Note: Replace the IDs of PUID, and PGID with the IDs of your user. TZ denotes time zone which can also be changed based on your region

• In the above compose file, we will be creating a volume to store all our Sonarr 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 shows are and will be stored after the download is completed.

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

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

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

Configuring Sonarr:

• First, we need to head to the Sonarr login page. By default, the admin login would reside on port 8989. We can type in the IP Address:8989 to open the same.

Note: In the docker-compose file, we have used port 8989. If this value is changed in the file then use the port number that you have given

• We will be greeted with the above screen. Here we need to enable authentication so that Sonarr 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 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 Sonarr instance to Prowlarr so that Sonarr can take the indexers directly from Prowlarr instead of managing them separately.

Connecting Sonarr 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 Sonarr instance to connect both of them. Once done the indexers in Prowlarr will sync automatically in Sonarr.
• 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 Sonarr instance.

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

• Here, we can click on the Sonarr option.
• Now we can type in our Prowlarr instance URL and our Sonarr 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 Sonarr 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 Sonarr and our Prowlarr instances.

Connecting Sonarr and qBittorent:

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

• In our Sonarr 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 qBittorent details.

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

Managing Contents:

We have successfully installed Sonarr, configured Prowlarr as our inedexer 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 Series option in the left-hand side menu in our Sonarr instance and click on the Add New button

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

• Using the indexer configured in Prowlarr, Sonarr 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 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 button. Hence we can confirm all our configurations are working properly.

We have now successfully installed and configured out Sonarr 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 Sonarr 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 service that 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-sonarr-your-ultimate-tv-show-management-tool/