So there’s the “official” set of tools from servarr.com, but there’s a few “unofficial” tools as well, but they all function similarly in that they glue several things together to make workflows nicer.
- A downloader (either a Bittorrent client or Usenet, but I will focus on Bittorrent).
- An Indexer, some remote site (like thepiratebay.org) or BitMagnet (local DHT scraper) for searching for torrents. Prowlarr is the generic indexer component, so it can provide Indexer’s to other components (Sonarr, Radarr, etc.), but you don’t need to use Prowlarr if the site
- A downloads folder.
- A media library folder.
After adding your media library so the component knows what you “have” already, you tell the component (say “Sonarr” for TV shows) what you “want” and it’s added to a wanted list. It also knows what you already have. When you add a new show to your wanted list it can immediately download it, or it can wait for new episodes to be released and only download those. When downloading it will download to the downloads folder and then copy (you can change settings so it uses hard links, so these copies don’t take up extra space). It will only copy the media files and ignore .nfo/readme.txt style files, and it will change the format to the one Plex/JellyFin want (with <show>/<season X>/S__E__ - Episode title.mkv) By default it will seed for a certain amount and then delete the files from the downloads folder/remove from the torrent client, but this is configurable. It can also look for higher quality versions like if you have 480p versions of a show and 1080p versions become available it can download them and replace the lower quality versions with higher quality (it does not do this by default).
But that’s fundamentally how they work, they have a media library with certain things, and a list of things you “want” and then a way to download things to get from the want list into the media library without needing to do any manual intervention (except manually adding things to your wanted list)
I have a high tolerance for technical stuff, but quite honestly I am overwhelmed by the *arr tools. I have never been able to understand exactly what they each do, how to make them work together, and what the prerequisites are, e.g. a Usenet account.
A lot of unnecessary work.
You could say this about a lot of automation tools. A properly-functioning *arr stack is nothing more than an automation tool. Punch a movie/tv show into Overseerr, the *arrs work in the background with your downloader client (torrent or Usenet), and some time later - depending on your internet bandwidth - it appears in Plex/Jellyfin.
The convenience of the end result is worth the work.
No its just not that convenient for the LOE. You know what just requires punching in the title you want? Most private tracker uis. Click download and the client picks up the torrent file from your downloads folder
Fuck retrovibed has an rss feed reader and you can just click bookmark in a trackers ui and it’ll download in the background.
I took one look at the arr stack and noped right the fuck out.
I kinda agree. IIRC, they were originally built for downloading from newsgroups, which does need a lot of automation. Personally, I do find Sonarr useful, so I don’t have to manually keep track of when new episodes come out. Before Sonarr, I used to use a tool that was configured with YAML or something, forgot what it was. I do run an *arr stack now because I have a multi-member household, and they don’t want to go searching for stuff on trackers, so they just use Overseerr.
hehe they’re clearly products of their times/ecosystems. I dont judge people for using them. I just shake my head at what people are willing to tolerate when there are far easier mechanisms to find and download. I havent had to go outside of a single tracker atm for my uses so that might be part of it.
Best setup for storage fiends