If anyone else is having issues setting these up, message me and I will zip the whole build to you and walk you through setup.
UPDATE:
So I’ve made some major progress but still have a persistent issue. Radarr, sonarr, and lidarr are set to rename files, rename folders, and move them to the root directory. Even after importing the media the do not do that. I have both the boxes for renaming ticked, I have hard links turned off, they all have permissions for all the directories involved, and they have the media available in the program. If anyone knows how to fix this I’d love the help. I literally did all of this because I don’t want to manually rename 1600 files into a consistent scheme and Radarr apparently doesn’t want to either.
I used yams.media to do the full install. It was incredibly easy to use for most of the installation and setup. The Mullvad wireguard setup was a pain. The VPN part of yams specifically says to follow the instructions to the letter but the link it gives is a 404. The mullvad.md it was supposed to take me to was just “TLDR” and two code boxes with no explanation. I managed to bungle my way through with some knowledge from past attempts and the yams VPN test says I’m in Switzerland and my client is ready to go.
Yams wouldn’t let me set the directories I needed (it wants one directory for everything and I’m sorting them into different mounted drives) but it was actually remarkably easy to copy the yams config folders into my preferred directory and the yaml file directly into portainer to create a portainer stack running everything I needed. I even learned how to use the env and “advanced env input” in portainer to correct all the variable sections instead of writing all of them myself. All in all, it was exactly what I was wanting to do when I posted the TLDR.
Tl;dr: I understand docker is supposed to help get things running on different systems easily, can someone give me a copy of their working Arr stack?
Frustrated venting I’m past being new to this server thing having run mine for over a year so I guess I can officially say I’m just bad at it. I’ve been working on getting Sonarr, Radarr, and, lidarr running since 4 in the afternoon, discounting dinner that’s 6 hours of constantly failing to get these to work. This is my 5th time trying since I learned about it in April.
I’ve given up on the automatic downloads, I’ve given up on the request system, I’m even done with the torrenting, I’ll just do that on my phone. All I want is something that format my 5TB of media to Title (date) instead of MOVIE_TITLE_ALL_UNDERSCORE, or TB_1000, or movie.videoformat.year.special.deluxe.username.host.visit.my.site.please. I was sold on this idea that self hosting was a relatively easy thing that anyone can get into and while I have a good understanding of how a config.yml is supposed to look and work, and I’ve got a decent understanding of ssh and sftp between two computers, but trying to grt any one of these things to run is soul crushing. I literally work in the foster system and my worst cases do not give me the stress this does. I just want to get it fixed so I can watch Pokemon with my family and offer it to people who will never bother to log on.
Edit: OMFG I moved them back into individual folders and they work now. 6 hours of videos and tutorials and not a single thing saying they absolutely have to be in their own folders or it won’t work. edit unclear, brain stuck in toaster
Edit 2: turns out, Radarr can’t find movies at /movies/movie.mkv and needs /movies/folder/movie.mkv. Now Radarr can import movies but all other problems persist.
I am really glad to read stuff like this. Not because I like seeing someone struggle, but rather it makes me feel less alone that I am not the only one getting frustrated with things that seemingly work perfectly for everyone else that I run into every error/obstacle in the book lol. If I post for help in online forums like Lemmy, the replies make me feel so stupid and sometimes the replies are even condescending, which is extremely demotivational at times and makes me not want to ever ask to get it fixed. But eventually I get there and say screw all that and keep on going till it works. I’m happy you posted this and got your problem fixed my friend.
Also extremely relatable with the media server that friends and family refuse to use while paying like $30 a month on stupid subscriptions lmao
Hahaha so true. At least the struggling part. I spent a lot of time before getting my things running smoothly, but hei I was a full beginner. It 's not that I don’t dare too ask, it’s just that usually I try hard to find a solution before asking and mostly get it working. But yeah, that’s many hours of setup.
Last paragraph: definitely.
Considering all of them are supposed to integrate with each other they’re relatively hard to integrate. I find it rather astounding they haven’t figured out service discovery.
I get this feeling hard. You’re comment 3 out of 11 that I woke up to, comment one sent me to yet another guide to read and comment 2 congradulated me for getting it working. That’s on me for not classifying at midnight on a work night that the only thing I fixed was Radarr can now find the movies. Everything else is still broken.
Everyone talks about docker being an easy way to share things around, I’d assume it’d be easier to zip a working installation and send it my way than to find a guide I haven’t read.
We’re rowing the same boat
Here is my docker-compose.yml file with sensitive info scrubbed, its been working for me for a few years now. It sounds like the problem you are having is not with Docker but something in your configuration once the container is running. Feel free to message me if you have questions.
services: gluetun: container_name: gluetun cap_add: - NET_ADMIN image: qmcgaw/gluetun:v3 devices: - /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun environment: - VPN_SERVICE_PROVIDER= - VPN_TYPE= - WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY= - WIREGUARD_ADDRESSES= - SERVER_COUNTRIES= - DNS_ADDRESS= - HTTP_CONTROL_SERVER_ADDRESS= - HTTPPROXY_LISTENING_ADDRESS= - TZ=America/New_York ports: - 3129:3129/tcp # HTTP proxy - 8388:8388/tcp # Shadowsocks - 8388:8388/udp # Shadowsocks - 9047:9047 # Gluten http_control - 9046:9046 # qbittorent webui - 9696:9696 # Prowlarr - 7878:7878 # Radarr - 8989:8989 # Sonarr - 8686:8686 # Lidarr volumes: - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro restart: 'unless-stopped' qbittorrent: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:5.1.4 container_name: qbittorrent network_mode: "service:gluetun" environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=America/New_York - WEBUI_PORT=9046 volumes: - /mnt/drive/volumes/qbittorrent/data:/config - /mnt/nas/Downloads:/downloads depends_on: - gluetun prowlarr: container_name: prowlarr network_mode: "service:gluetun" image: ghcr.io/hotio/prowlarr:latest volumes: - /mnt/drive/volumes/prowlarr/config:/config - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro depends_on: - gluetun restart: 'unless-stopped' byparr: container_name: byparr image: ghcr.io/thephaseless/byparr:latest network_mode: "service:gluetun" init: true depends_on: - gluetun restart: 'unless-stopped' radarr: container_name: radarr network_mode: "service:gluetun" image: ghcr.io/hotio/radarr:latest volumes: - /mnt/drive/volumes/radarr/config:/config - /mnt/movies:/mnt/Movies - /mnt/nas/Downloads:/downloads - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro depends_on: - gluetun sonarr: container_name: sonarr network_mode: "service:gluetun" image: ghcr.io/hotio/sonarr:latest volumes: - /mnt/drive/volumes/sonarr/config:/config - /mnt/nas/TV:/mnt/TV - /mnt/nas/Downloads:/downloads - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro depends_on: - gluetun restart: 'unless-stopped' lidarr: container_name: lidarr network_mode: "service:gluetun" image: ghcr.io/hotio/lidarr:pr-plugins volumes: - /mnt/drive/volumes/lidarr/config:/config - /mnt/nas/Music:/mnt/Music - /mnt/nas/Downloads:/downloads - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro depends_on: - gluetun restart: 'unless-stopped'Cool I have different docker-compose.yml files for each service did not even think to put them in one.
I think they have to be for the gluetun(vpn container) dependency, but I could be mistaken. It does make it easier to
docker compose up -dand have the whole stack startup.They dont. I have gluetun and qbittorrent in one docker compose and the starrs in a separate docker compose.
I use wireguard so I wouldn’t know.
So do I, I’m just using it in gluetun so that I can pass all the traffic from this stack of containers in this yaml file through it and not other traffic. Gluetun is a pretty cool project, it made it easy too setup a connection to mullvad. https://github.com/passteque/gluetun
Isn’t passing arrs traffic through the VPN NOT recommended? What are the advantages of that? I don’t have byparr in my stack but do have flaresolverr. I haven’t had issues (besides Cloudflare changing the backend). Wondering whether I should pass arrs through the tunnel as well
Yams (Yet another media server) starts you off with a full media arr stack, as well as your client of choice, torrent & nzb clients, and walks you through connecting all the pieces.
It also has built in methods for setting up a VPN tunnel for your torrents, which is definitely recommended. After running through the setup, you’ll end up with a compose file, and full docker media server stack. (I think even music arr client is included, but its been a long time since I set this up).
So I actually used it to set everything up last night and it did actually work all the way through, 9/10 easy. My only issue was that it expected a file structure that didn’t jive with the goblin tech I’m using for my server.
That said, it was surprisingly easy to modify the entire stack and copy it into portainer. I’m still working my way through the setup, but so far it’s smooth sailing.
Does it also use VPN network for arr containers? So their torrent queries are also through VPN?
Not oc but just used it myself. It makes a gluten network in docker for the torrenting. It doesn’t run the others through it but you can modify the yaml to make the change yourself. If you want yams entirely it has a custom yaml that you can modify and a default that gets reset with every update. Modify the custom to change the network for the other arrs. Also, if I understand the system correctly, you only need to put prowler in the box with qbittorrrent. When using prowlarr, the arrs just say “hey I don’t have a thing” to prowlarr and prowlarr specifically finds the torrent and delivers it to qbit to download.
I’m currently in my research phase, before I begin setting up my are stack. But I found this video, and it seems like it’s just the thing you’re looking for:
Ultimate automated media server 2026
In the description, he has this link to his GitHub for automated setup with all Docker containers needed etc https://github.com/loponai/arrstack
He also has a newer video on the area stack, haven’t watched it myself yet
I have watched this one, automation avenue is actually the one that got me the furthest before wireguard and gluten stumbled me. I haven’t checked the new one though.
https://trash-guides.info/File-and-Folder-Structure/How-to-set-up/Docker/#docker-compose-example
Trash guides are great and highly recommend by the servarr/sonarr team
That’s actually what I followed the previous try. It got me further than anything else but it fell apart because Mullvad doesn’t do OpenVPN and I couldn’t figure out how to get wireguard to work. Even then, on trying to rename and organize all my files, it just corrected them in Sonarr, Radarr, and jellyfin which broke all of my manually curated movies and it left all the files with the dumb mismatch they already have.
https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/tips-and-tricks#creating-a-folder-for-each-movie
I recommend being really specific on what issues you’re facing when you want help. Your post was pretty generic and so you’re getting a lot of different answers.
If discord is your thing, the servarr/sonarr/trash folks each have their own discord where you can get help.
That’s actually what I was trying with the TLDR. As I understood it, docker is popular because once you get it running on one system you can use docker to make it run on any system. So my assumption was that someone who has the arr stuff working could just send me a copy of their config.yml and the directory it makes when you up and then I just tweak the locations and names on my side. I get that’s probably not possible but I’ll take literally anything at this point.
You’re not wrong but when you use somebody else’s config you use somebody else’s…configuration. Like if they use ProtonVPN, you’ll need to use ProtonVPN as well. If they use Usenet instead of torrents, that’s what you’ll get as well. If somebody uses Podman instead of Docker, etc etc. So this is why it can be more difficult than just ripping configs from strangers.
This is the classic problem where the more flexibility a program has, the more fragmentation comes out of it. The *arr stack is complicated for this reason. It’s a million different pieces that can be configured in a million different ways. Something like Nextcloud is much more plug-and-play. I’ve been doing self-hosting for years now and even I find *arr a chore to deal with.
Though nothing wrong with referencing other people’s configs to get a sense of what it’s supposed to look like. Start simple, look for somebody who has a radarr + qbittorrent + gluetun stack working, and go from there.
just joining in on the misery. arr-s overpromise and underdeliver, tried for a month and gave up with just jellyfin and qbittorrent web. jellyfin is ok at masking the atrocious file names and directory structure, bless its soul
What did you try to do and how did it under deliver?
That’s what I’ll be doing if I can’t make it do the Renames. I just can’t handle seeing all that extra nonsense in the name files.
Here’s mine. I have separate stacks for media players (Plex, JF) and downloaders (sabnzbd, qbittorrent), so I added their networks to the config. I also chose to mount the volumes directly in the YAML instead of the VM’s
fstab, I found it plays a bit nicer that way. None of this is exposed to the internet. And I need to reconfigure the *seerrs, since Jellyseerr and Overseerr merged into one project…volumes: movies: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Movies tvshows: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/TV_Shows music: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Music torrents: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Torrents prerolls: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Plex_prerolls books: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Books downloads: driver_opts: type: nfs o: addr=192.168.1.175,nolock,soft,nfsvers=4 device: :/Downloads services: sonarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest container_name: sonarr restart: unless-stopped environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/sonarr_config:/config - tvshows:/TV_Shows - torrents:/Torrents - downloads:/Downloads ports: - 8989:8989 networks: - plex_default - downloaders_default radarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest container_name: radarr restart: unless-stopped environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/radarr_config:/config - movies:/Movies - torrents:/Torrents - downloads:/Downloads ports: - 7878:7878 networks: - plex_default - downloaders_default lidarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:latest container_name: lidarr restart: unless-stopped environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/lidarr_config:/config - music:/Music - torrents:/Torrents - downloads:/Downloads ports: - 8686:8686 networks: - plex_default - downloaders_default bazarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/bazarr:latest container_name: bazarr environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/bazarr_config:/config - movies:/Movies - tvshows:/TV_Shows ports: - 6767:6767 restart: unless-stopped networks: - downloaders_default - plex_default overseerr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/overseerr:latest container_name: overseerr restart: unless-stopped environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/overseerr_config:/config ports: - 5055:5055 networks: - plex_default - downloaders_default jellyseerr: image: fallenbagel/jellyseerr:latest container_name: jellyseerr environment: - LOG_LEVEL=debug - TZ=Etc/UTC - PORT=5055 ports: - 5056:5055 volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/jellyseerr_config:/app/config healthcheck: test: wget --no-verbose --tries=1 --spider http://localhost:5055/api/v1/status || exit 1 start_period: 20s timeout: 3s interval: 15s retries: 3 restart: unless-stopped prowlarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:latest container_name: prowlarr restart: unless-stopped environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=Etc/UTC volumes: - /var/lib/docker/volumes/prowlarr_config:/config ports: - 9696:9696 networks: - plex_default - downloaders_default networks: plex_default: external: true downloaders_default: external: trueThis may or may not help, but I went through the exact same sort of struggles that you did when I first started. Setting up all this was my first forray into Linux and learning about permissions and file systems was a hurdle but having conquered that my primary issues were always caused by one of the following:
- file path mapping
- permissions
- port routing in gluetun
- gluetun/mullvad incompatibilities
Now that I actually seem to have a handle on all this…mind you, I’m no expert, but I can walk people through it in plain english. I eventually ended up switching to Proton VPN and use cloudflare tunnels to access my services from outside the network.
Late to the party but congrats on getting them up! Might I also suggest bazarr (https://github.com/morpheus65535/bazarr) so you don’t have to find subtitles manually.
I have that one too, it’s the only one that never gives me trouble. The rest are still broken as shit but atleast Radarr can find the movies now.
Yams.media is a script with an easy to follow guide that will hold your hand through the entire setup. All you need to do afterwards is import your existing media using radarr/sonarr.
Ok, so let me get this straight before I jump in. This is basically a prepackaged install wizard for docker, Arr stuff, torrent client, VPN, and jellyfin? I don’t need to install a different OS because it runs on Ubuntu server.
The one hang up I found is the same thing I didn’t understand using the trash guide, migrating gluten to wireguard for Mullvad. Could you or anyone that’s reading this parse this info for me and tell me how to double check if it worked?
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/mullvad.md
There’s a guide for switching to Wireguard. Yams also includes a command:
yams check-vpnthat tells you if the VPN is working.
Not sure if that directly answers your question but there are a lot of step-by-step guides on the site and the author has also answered a lot of user questions on the message board.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Plex Brand of media server package VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #18 for this comm, first seen 18th Jun 2026, 15:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Just use Saltbox
https://docs.saltbox.dev/saltbox/basics/basics/
It’s exactly what you’re trying to achieve but battle tested
What’s the difference between this and yam?
Haven’t used YAMS
But having read the page, I’d say it’s much more pluggable.
There are dozens of community plugins to install other docker based tools with Saltbox.
Also, it’s a rewrite of an older project and has been in development for longer than YAMS. I’ve been using it for around 8 years or so.
The joy of struggle and learning! You learned 6 hours worth of what doesn’t work.
This is literally how I learn. Read, Do, Fuck It Up, ad nauseam until I get it right, and then write that shit down.
What a wonderful rant!
Not exactly your use case, but maybe someone will find it useful:
I really like https://compose.ajnart.dev/ - the creator of homarr (a dashboard with a lot of integrations) build a tool for creating docker compose files.
You can configure what services you’d like to run or use a predefined template (e.g. “the dad” with Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Pihole, Homarr and Home Assistant).
You’d still have to understand what you are doing, of course.
I’m down for something that makes the compose for me. I already get that part but it would be nice to not have to copy, paste, and fill my template each time.
Since it’s mentioned and this is a general suggestion, if you’re looking at Home Assistant, understand that the Docker version and the OS version are different and all of the videos don’t warn you about that. If you use the Docker version you have to manually install all the plugins where the OS has an app store. I didn’t know and all I wanted it for was chore-ops.
