No idea what either of these were in the first place. Feels like it could have been worth a mention in the post.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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I've tried to set various of these apps up in the past - I used to do tech support; I am a geek - and for whatever reason, I could never get all the parts working right. I assume many people can since they're popular, but it just never clicked for me.
But I have a pretty good workflow - a seedbox running rutorrent which allows me to send magnet links to it just clicking them in Firefox, with emby installed so I can stream from the box - or easily connect via FTP to download when I prefer.
That's the nice thing - there's a number of ways to accomplish the goal, so finding the one that works well for you is what's important.
That said, I don't remember which ones these are, but I think it began with "Sonarr" to download music and the various somewhat-similarly named projects are about finding and downloading various forms of media automatically based on rules or searches or keywords or whatever. Which is nicer than my system of reminders that stuff should drop and I should go look for a torrent for it. :)
there goes the opportunity to call it Joeverseerr
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
[Thread #98 for this comm, first seen 16th Feb 2026, 17:21] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I hate how so many of the arr apps don't describe what they do in a way that people who don't already know can understand.
Even the tutorials and guides are frustratingly vague.
I agree it took many months to figure out my arr stack and the configuration with API keys and server ip addresses. I used countless resources and guides and it didn't help. Now I can do a fresh install of jellyfin and the arr stack in less than an hour after finally figuring it out but wow was it a hard learning curve. I have paper notes trying to decode which tools does what I was so confused
I hate how fragmented they are. I've given up on various guides out there for 'setting up the arr stack' because of getting bogged down in since miniature detail that, IMHO, shouldn't even be a thing. I get that hosting seperate services has advantages. But the disadvantage of giving up on the whole thing because you have to sort out networking and file permission issues between the service that downloads video files over an hour long and the service that downloads video files under an hour outweighs those advantages.
Spoiler: I am deeply into the arr "ecosystem" and love the shit out of it.
I think I finally understand Linux fans. Yes it's confusing for new people, but because I'm so into the weeds on this stuff I love how much choice I have. And if one of the projects doesn't have what we want, someone makes a fork.
To point: you really only need Sonarr and Radarr. Get those set up and working how you like. I recommend the Trash Guides. Once that's working how you like, get Prowlarr for easy management of your usenet and torrent indexers. Most people should stop there.
You're not alone. It's super frustrating when things don't work and you have to search through 4 apps to figure out what is wrong. This architecture makes the whole setup brittle.
Fortunately, there are all in one alternatives to the arr stack. I found a couple, but I think Cinephage is the most mature.
Do you know how it compares to bobarr?
You said it's the most mature, but it's only about 2 months old and coded partially with AI.
I'm interested in this but paranoid about security, and don't know how much I can trust something newish they also has some code the developer might not understand.
Oh thanks, I hadn't even noticed that. I did some research into *arr alternatives a few weeks ago. I found 3 and this one looked like it had the most features. I will look up the other two contenders again then.
Let me know if you find what they are - I'm interested in a solution like this anyhow too.
Found them:
- https://github.com/maxdorninger/MediaManager?tab=readme-ov-file
- https://github.com/getmydia/mydia If you get round to it and have an opinion on these alternatives, let me know.
The first one seems to be the most trust worthy, as it's nearly a year old and has sponsorship apparently from Digital Ocean. Might try that one. The UI isn't as pretty but it still seems much simpler than managing an Aar stack.
The second one is also young, but programmed mostly in a language I hadn't heard about (Elixer).
the service that downloads video files over an hour long and the service that downloads video files under an hour
Huh. That sounds overly complicated. I just link everything with my torrent client. Tracker (prowlarr) into media managers (sonarr/radarr) into torrent client. That's it.
I have jellyseer in there too but that's a separate service that just works. The core stack is the other paragraph.
Everything is installed in my local server using the install script, no docker.
I think avoiding containers is the way I'm going to go on my next attempt. I'll still have to put it in an lxc or a VM on my proxmox, but all in one will hopefully reduce some problems. The sonarr/radarr split was what I was referring to with the above or below an hour comment.
What problems did you have? I just put the services I wanted in a compose file, configured sonarr/radarr to use prowlarr and my torrent client and done.
Later I added lidarr and readarr but ended up removing the last one. I found it easy enough, and the modularity makes it easy to use only what you need.
Just in case you wanna try again with readarr, after all the little drama and the main app being unmaintained, there’s 2 forks which are maintained and work pretty well
- Faustvii/readarr simply fixes the app to keep running
- pennydreadful/bookshelf adds a choice of metadata provider, so you can use hardcover (instead of goodreads) for really good metadata
I’ve successfully been running bookshelf for a bit now, after the original stopped working for me completely.
I'll keep them in mind, but I stopped using readarr because the sonarr/radarr approach didn't work for me for books. I read individual books more than subscribe to everything an author does, and manually downloading them is not really a problem.
Ikr like... Give me a docker compose file and tell me what env vars need to be set to what. Why is it so complicated?
Completely agree. If the *arr stack had environment variables for key settings, I'm sure we'd see Compose files instead of TRaSH how-to guides. It's frustrating everything is configured in the GUI.
Either you misconfigured something or you are very new to this.
Keep it up.
As for good guides: Trash-guides
They provide a very in depth set-up that works really well.
The only thing you'll need after this, is a source for the files.
I'll be honest, only the first setup gave me some trouble as I was tackling docker compose too. After you gain familiarity setting up a new arr is basically copying the provided yaml service then filling in the envs with yours
ok, but why do I want to use this? what does it do? what is its purpose?
The arr stack is for downloading media in an automated matter, for example sonarr will scan the inderxers you give them for the series you want and automatically download them. Then you can use a service like jellyfin to watch your media
I'm aware of what the arr stack is for generally, but not with overseerr and jellyseerr
I'm aware of what the arr stack is for generally, but not with overseerr and jellyseerr
It's basically like https://thetvdb.com/ & https://www.themoviedb.org/ with buttons to auto download the media and automations on the backend to make that all happen.
I am very familiar with a decent amount of the words used in this comment.
this sarcasm or ya actually in the know?
Given it's a suite of tools designed specifically to download copyrighted content, why are you surprised that descriptions are coy and elusive?
Is it for downloading illegal content? i can't tell
I assume some of it is related to torrenting, but I can't tell which ones and how much. They can't all be for torrenting, right????
They're all for downloading copyrighted content or for performing auxiliary functions to downloading copyrighted content (e.g. Bazaar downloads subtitle files, which aren't copyrighted), not for torrenting specifically. You can use Usenet clients or torrent clients as backend.
Maybe thats by design. Some sort of gate keeping
I could have sworn I read this announcement a couple of months ago.
Yea they announced it months ago, but the first release of seerr just dropped today.
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