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.
Glad you solved it yourself, but I’m still struggling to understand what happened, how did you have them all in a single folder if the filename for docker compose has to be one of a few predetermined things? I mean, you could have them all in a single file, which makes some things easier, but then you wouldn’t have been able to move them into individual folders. Would you mind explaining what happened there so that if someone else in the future has the same issue they might find the solution here?
Also, note that even if someone had given you an example of a working docker file you would still have to configure the service. For future reference, this site is great and has working examples of docker compose files for a lot of services, e.g. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/radarr
Finally, welcome to the club, sorry you had a bad experience the first time, it’s hard for us to know what’s obvious and what isn’t: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Sorry, it was late and I was very frustrated.
Radar, sonarr, and lidarr are each installed via docker into their own directories.
I recently did a complete reformat of my server and organization because the first try was a mess and this try I started organizing from the start. When backing up my media I moved just the video files from my first server to backup so I could delete all the extra jellyfin pics, torrent site ads, and folders of bulk subs. This meant the /movies was just 900GB of video files in a folder.
I mistakenly thought that Radarr would would take all the movies out of there and put them in the new location in their own folders as well as format the movie name and folder names to my specified schemes. Radarr would show the movies in the file list when I pick the directory but when I ran the import it would give me “all movies imported” without importing any of them.
As it turns out, each movie file needs to be in its own folder inside /movies, then Radarr will recognize they’re there and import them.
That’s all I managed to fix.
Ah ok this is the comment that needs to be in the main post. First things first:
You aren’t ‘installing’ radarr, sonarr, etc into any directories. They are containers, essentially entire operating systems located in a hidden folder on your server. You don’t ever touch these things directly, you only use docker commands to interface with them. There’s two ways to do that. Either directly running docker (
docker run linuxserver:radarr -p blah blah blah) or with a docker compose (docker compose up). The docker compose way is the ‘easy’ way to do it (actually the easiest is just using unraid and clicking install, but we’ll ignore that since so many people are telling you a billion ways to do things). Docker compose means you can specify all of your applications in a single file, and how they interact with each other. You will run one command to start all of them at once. And then they will read from whatever folders you configure in the service. This might be a bit confusing because up above you might see other people’s docker compose files and they specify things like this: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'and you would think that they’re configuring the sonarr locations for their tv and downloads, etc. But that is not what is happening. They are simply mapping a local path
/mnt/nas/TVto a path inside of the sonarr operating system/mnt/TV. This means that in Sonarr, in the web interface, you would configure the path/mnt/TV, NOT the path/mnt/nas/TV. You still have to configure EVERYTHING in the services themselves. All that docker is doing is setting up the operating system. Think of it like this, on a regular computer you can map network drives to letters like A, B, C, etc right? Well that’s exactly what you’re doing in docker, mapping ‘network’ (actually your main operating system) folders, to folders in the remote operating system (the one running in docker).In regards to having radarr rename things, you can have it do that, but you have to get the directory structure set up first, and you can run scripts to have nzbget or sabnzbd move things around for you. The experts on discord would be a much better help than most of us here I think, since they are all the devs on the project.
I’m very confused what it was that they moved into individual folders. And also configuring the naming of movies and shows is done in radarr and sonarr, not in docker compose.
I highly recommend Trash Guides for configuring these services. https://trash-guides.info/
Poor explanation on my part. I had to move each of my movies from /movies/movie.mkv to /movies/folder/movie.mkv before Radarr could import them. I gave up after that so when I get off work today I’ll be able to actually import them and see if it moves and renames them this time.
You shouldn’t be manually moving anything, though sometimes it is necessary. But when you’re first getting started I really just recommend following the TRaSH guides and then redownloading a few things to make sure it works properly. It explains a lot and it’s exactly what the people on the discord will tell you to do for all of this before going any further.
My only guess is that they were trying to map their config/downloads/library folders to the same location. And yeah, that probably wouldn’t work.
Poor explanation on my part. I had to move each of my movies from /movies/movie.mkv to /movies/folder/movie.mkv before Radarr could import them. I gave up after that so when I get off work today I’ll be able to actually import them and see if it moves and renames them this time.
Ah yeah, that’s because it will use the folder to store extra files as well, like subtitles, metadata, poster art, etc… Just dumping every media file into a single “Movies” library isn’t great, because you’ll have a ton of overlapping files. Separating them into their own folders allows you to store those extra files alongside the media.