Disclaimer: Neither the author of this article nor the publication nor the developers of codes used in this article condone or encourage downloading, sharing, seeding, or peering copyright material. International laws prohibit such activities which are illegal. This article serves educational purposes only.
How to set up a media server at home
I will be using windows but these steps can be followed for any OS after installing these services
Prerequisites
Make sure you have all applications installed correctly for your system
Jackett
Jackett works as a proxy server: it translates queries from apps (Sonarr, Radarr, SickRage, CouchPotato, Mylar, Lidarr, DuckieTV, qBittorrent, Nefarious etc.) into tracker-site-specific http queries, parses the html response, then sends results back to the requesting software. This allows for getting recent uploads (like RSS) and performing searches. Jackett is a single repository of maintained indexer scraping & translation logic – removing the burden from other apps.
If you installed Jackett correctly you can open it on localhost:9117 or your computers ip 192.168.1.30:9117 you can use this to access it across other devices in your network just make sure you enabled firewall rules
Let's start by adding an indexer to Jackett
Im going to add rarbg, search for rarbg or any indexer you want and click on the configure button
A popup will appear, click the okay button, you should now have a torrent site configured on jackett
Now we can add this to Sonarr and Raddarr
Qbittorent
Once you Qbitorrent installed we need to make sure its accessible over a web gui,
Open Qbittorent application go to settings -> web gui
You can leave the Ip address with * and feel free to change the port number if you already have an application running on that port, I will leave everything in default.
Don't forget to create a password and click apply,
Now to downloads settings on the left menu
Make sure subcategories are selected
Change the download path mine is C:/completed-torrents
Use another path for incompleted torrents C:/downloading-torrents
Make sure those folders exist
Now scroll to Run external program -> Run on torrent finished
Add this in the text field "C:\Program Files\WinRAR\WinRAR.exe" x -r -y "%D*.rar" "%D" this script will check if the torrent has any rar files and will automatically extract them for you. Make sure you have winrar installed
Click apply and go to BitTorrent setting
Enable torrent Queuing this will limit how many download you can have at once. Also, enable Seeding limits some private torrent sites require you to seed to a certain ratio with this you can make sure to stop seeding once that limit has been reached.
Click apply and then Ok and make sure you can reach Qbitorrent from a browser should be on port 8080 if you left it as default.
login with username and password and you should see the torrent on the browser now
Plex
Plex straight forward sign up go over the install process, install plex server add your folder location for movies and tv shows.
Make sure you have created a folder for movies and tvshows on your hard drive
Repeat the same process for TV shows
Click next then finish.
Sonarr
Sonarr monitors multiple feeds for new/upcoming episodes of your favourite shows and will download, sort and rename them. Imagine an ongoing weekly tv show Sonarr will automatically grab every new episode and will add it to your plex library.
Open sonarr in localhost:8989, in windows, make sure to enable firewall rules to access this in other devices on your network
Have a look here https://forums.sonarr.tv/t/cant-access-sonarr-on-a-networked-computer/11195/7
Configuring Indexers
Go to settings -> indexers
In here we are going to connect to jackett
Click on the + button to add a new indexer
As you can see there a few Indexeres available already, but we are going to use Torznab to communicate with our Jackett service
A special "all" indexer is available at /api/v2.0/indexers/all/results/torznab. It will query all configured indexers and return the combined results.
In the URL field use: http://127.0.0.1:9117/api/v2.0/indexers/all/results/torznab
Make sure on the categories dropdown to select everything in TV and same for Anime categories.
Go to Jackett and copy the API key in the top right and paste it in the API Key field in sonarr
name the indexer All and click on the save button
Download clients
Go to download clients in settings and add new download client
Select your Download client mine is qBittorrent so will go ahead and select that,
I will open another modal, enter a name and the username and password you set
If you changed the port number make sure to update that too
It also created a category called tv-sonarr which will put all your sonarr downloads inside a folder called tv-sonarr
Click save
Connect
Now go to settings -> Connect
We now need to connect to plex, so once a show has finished downloading this will notify plex to update the server, click on the add Connections button and select plex media serve
There are a few options here you can also use services like discord to notify you that a show as finished downloaded or been added to plex
Click on Authenticate with Plex.tv, make sure your host is correct then click save.
Media Management
Click on add Root folder, find a path to your tv show folder you set up for plex and add it
This should match the same directory in your plex media server for tv shows
Under Rename Episodes
Select the checkbox
This will rename every file to match that standard
Now click on Save changes at the top of Media Management
Profiles
If you go into settings -> profiles and delete the ones you do not want for example I want all my shows to be at least 1080p quality minimum, Delete all profiles, create a new one and select your desired resolutions, for me it will be 1080p/4k resolutions only
Click on save button
Adding a show
If you go into the series and click add new, search for the show you want, then select the show a modal should appear
I'm going to add House of Dragon
Root folder is being automatically selected since we have only one, and the same for profiles. We can click on start search for missing episodes, but I will do this manually for now since I don't want to download the entire season, click Add button
You can start a search by clicking on the season folder if its a completed show it will download a season pack or you can search per episode
I will search for Episode 1, this will enable a search on using our indexer from jackett.
If we open our torrent client we will see the show downloading
We can notice on Qbitorrent the category for this download is tv-sonarr
The amazing thing about Sonarr is it will now keep monitoring this Show so when season two is released it will automatically grab it and download the episode for you.
Once the download is complete it will be available on Plex
Now if you look in the completed-torrents folder and the tvshow folder, you have two copies at the moment, this is to ensure Sonarr doesn't interfere with the seeding on the torrent client side, because we told Qbittorrent to remove and delete files once it was reached a seed ratio of 1 or passed a certain time whichever comes first. This will ensure the torrent file is seeded and then it will be deleted not to take out space on the HDD
Radarr
Radarr is basically a fork of Sonarr but to manage movies, You can add upcoming movies and once it's available it will grab it and add it to plex
To set up Radarr repeat everything on Sonarr steps.
Overseerr
Overseerr is a request management and media discovery tool built to work with your existing Plex ecosystem.
Overseerr helps you find media you want to watch. With inline recommendations and suggestions, you will find yourself deeper and deeper in a rabbit hole of content you never knew you just had to have.
Overseerr connect with Sonarr and Radarr to facilitate media request all in one place
Quickest way to get started with overseer is to install it with docker compose
version: '3'
services:
overseerr:
image: sctx/overseerr:latest
container_name: overseerr
environment:
- LOG_LEVEL=debug
volumes:
- ./config:/app/config
ports:
- 5055:5055
restart: unless-stopped
Don't forget to map the correct path to the
configfolder
Build the docker image and complete the set up when you go to localhost:5055 you will need to log in with your plex account
Once you get to last step it will ask you to add Sonarr and Radarr settings.
You can find the API keys for Sonarr/Radarr in Settings -> General -> Security -> API Key
Starting with Sonarr settings
At this point, you will need the IP of your device as Overseerr is running inside a docker image and it can't access the localhost hostname
Apart from required settings enable these settings too:
Default 4k server,✔️
4K server ✔️
Season Folders ✔️
Enable Scan ✔️
Enable Automatic ✔️
Anime Quality Profile: select your profile
Anime Root Folder: select your root folder
Anime Language: select default language
Test it and then Add Server
Now add Radarr server
Default 4k server,✔️
4K server ✔️
Season Folders ✔️
Enable Scan ✔️
Enable Automatic ✔️
minimum availability: Announced
Add server and finish the setup
You will see your dashboard and you can see all your current media here from Sonarr/Radarr
To request a new show/movie select the movie/show you want to download
Click on the request button on the right side a modal will show and click on request button
The movie should now be added your Radarr library and begin to download
You can see both the movie downloaded and added to your Radarr library, If you add a TV show it will do the same thing
Top comments (16)
This is like finding gold ! Thank you so much it is so simple and straight forward. Exactly filling my needs !
Finishing building my local setup so I'll be running this down by the weekend!
Only question I have, is the docker part. I have never dipped in that, plan is to run all this on windows , is there anything I should know of ?
No all fine on windows that's where I have everything setup
i have my plex set up to be accessible from WAN, this is working fine and easy to setup thanks to plex.tv. How would you recommend to go about openning overseerr to the public i can just reroute the ports for it but i'm not sure if it's really secure for my network
The easiest way without opening any ports would be cloudflare tunnels, other way would be to setup nginx and only opening port 443 on your router, I use cloudflare tunnels it's just easy to use, I also use nginx for hosting my sites, check out nginx proxy manager makes it easier
Hey is there anyway I can get the pictures that went along with this?
I didn't even know they went down, I will try and find them
web.archive.org/web/20230327071826...
Searched online for hours till I found this article, it is easy to follow and there were actually no issues encountered. Made this account only to say THANK YOU!
Thank you
Thank you Rafael, this has been a massive help by having it all in one place!
Images are back!!
thank you @jim81jim for the web archive link
Glad I could help.
This is awesome, thank you for this guide!
It looks like a great article, but I would also love to see the images. Presumably, this is still relevant for 2024?
web.archive.org/web/20230327071826...
You legend!!!, I couldn't find the images