Hey guys! After over 2 years of me asking how to take the first steps in self-hosting, I think I’ve finally got most of the things I need set up (except for a mailcow server proxied through a VPS, but that’s for another day). I’ve been seeing a bunch of posts here about the *arr stack, and only recently it piqued my interest enough to really warrant a serious look. But I’ll be honest, it’s a bit confusing. For now, I’m just thinking of starting up the whole suite on my machine, then slowly expose to internet the parts I find useful (and shut down the parts I don’t). But I really can’t find any good…tutorial(?) on how to quickly get the whole stack running, and I’m a bit worried about launching individual apps since I don’t know if/how they communicate with each other. So I’ll try to summarize my, quite naïve, questions here:

  • how exactly do I set up a quick stack? Is that possible? And more importantly, is that recommended?
  • most of the tutorials/stacks I see online use plex for video streaming, but seeing a lot of negativity around plex and its pricing, I reckon using jellyfin would be better. Does it just plug into the ecosystem as easily as plex apparently does?
  • I’ve already set up a hack-ish navidrome instance to stream music, but managing files is a real hassle with it. Does sonarr(?) do it any better?

I know most of these questions can be easily answered through some LLM (which I don’t wanna rely on) or scouring documentation (which honestly look a bit daunting from my point right now), so I figured it’d be best to ask here. Thanks for any help!

    • TheMadCodger@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      You need two subscriptions. One to an indexer (https://nzb.su/) which acts like a search engine, and two to a Usenet that hosts media (https://frugalusenet.com/). These two aren’t the only two options out there, but I’ve been using them for years. YMMV.

      Once you have those subscriptions, you need to run sabnzbd in a docker container near your arrs, and point your arrs to the indexer as well as to sabnzbd. Tell Sonarr you want to find a show, it uses the indexer to see where it can be found, tells sabnzbd to acquire it using the servers you paid for in the Usenet group, downloads and pieces it back together and then files it where Sonarr tells it to. Jellyfin notices that media folder has something new, and you can watch it wherever.

      For more interesting cat facts, be sure to smash that subscribe button.