Introducing Prowlarr: Streamlining Your Content Management

Prowlarr in Proxmox LXC!

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

Now, let’s focus on another valuable tool that can enhance your content discovery and retrieval process — Prowlarr.

What is Prowlarr?

Prowlarr is an open-source application designed to simplify and optimize torrent and usenet indexer management. Similar to torrents, Usenet indexers play a crucial role in helping users discover and access content available on Usernet — a vast and decentralized network for file sharing.

Prowlarr brings several features to the table, making it a preferred choice for enthusiasts:

1. Unified Interface
2. Automation
3. Customization
4. Security

Disclaimer: Legal and Ethical Considerations

Before delving into the installation and usage of Prowlarr, 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 Prowlarr 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 Prowlarr:

• 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 Prowlarr 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 Prowlarr 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 Prowlarr 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 just copy and paste the below docker-compose file of our Prowlarr instance. Feel free to make changes to the file based on your needs.

version: "2.1"
services:

  prowlarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:latest
    container_name: prowlarr
    hostname: prowlarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - prowlarr_config:/config
    ports:
      - 9696:9696
    restart: always

volumes:
  prowlarr_config:

Note: In the above compose file, we will be creating a volume to store all our Prowlarr configuration files.

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

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

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

Configuring Prowlarr:

• First, we need to head to the Prowlarr login page. By default, the admin login would reside on port 9696. We can type in the IP Address:9696 to open the same.

Note: In the docker-compose file, we have used port 8080. 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 Prowlarr 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.
• We can click on the Add New Indexer button to get started with adding our first indexer.

• We can search for an indexer here. I’ll just apply some filters and select an indexer.

• Upon clicking an indexer we will be greeted with a configuration pop-up for that indexer. If any changes are needed, we will be able to configure it. But for me, I’ll leave it at the default and then hit the Test button to check if it works
• We can click on the Save button to save the indexer.

• We have successfully added an indexer. We will be able to see the list of indexers that we add, on this page.

Connecting Prowlarr and qBittorrent:

So far we have successfully installed Prowlarr in our Home Lab and have configured the same. We now need to connect our Prowlarr instance with our qBittorrent instance so that we will be able to download our fetched contents. This can be done by following the below steps:

• We can click on the Settings option on the left-hand side menu.

• Now we can click on the Download Clients option.

• 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 Prowlarr instance. We now will be able to easily download all our content.

Managing Contents:

We have successfully installed Prowlarr and 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 Search option in the left-hand side menu.

• Here at the bottom, we can see the Query box. I’ll just type in a name and then hit the Search button.

• Using the indexer that we added, Prowlarr lists all the possible contents for the query that we just searched.
• We now can click on the download option which is the first option on the right-hand side right next to the flag icon 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 download icon. Hence we can confirm all our configurations are working properly.

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

In this article, we have explored Prowlarr 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 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/introducing-prowlarr-streamlining-your-content-management/