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!
as always, the answer is “it depends” - everyone has their own unique flavor of *arr stack with different components. Breaking it down, everything revolves around the core apps:
These apps do the majority of the hard work of going from eg. “I want this movie” to “this movie file is now downloaded and placed into a subdirectory on my NAS or storage somewhere”
Realistically, all you need to get started is a download client (usenet, torrent client, whatever - the most popular choice is qbittorrent-nox or an equivalent docker container), your *arr app(s) of choice, and a way to consume and share the media you’ve now downloaded to your NAS or server (plex, jellyfin, stash, audiobookshelf, VLC, etc)
For consuming media, here’s a non-comprehensive list that most people will recommend at least one thing from:
The rest of the *arr ecosystem serves as a way to automate this core idea or fix issues with that automation. An example from my own homelab:
Not all of these will be useful to you, and you’ll likely find others that are more useful for your situation. Like I mentioned, everyone’s *arr stack is different and unique.
My recommendation: start with an *arr or two, configarr (optional but really recommended - hard to set up but once you do you’re good forever), prowlarr (optional but you’ll thank yourself later if you ever get into this and end up with more *arrs), and unpackerr (really do recommend this one) and go from there.
Gotta say this one’s probably more helpful than any guide I could’ve found online. This does give a very clear idea of what exactly it is I’m dealing with, I’ll [try to] keep all these points in mind while I try to manifest a makeshift first attempt. Thanks a ton for all this insight!
I’d also add:
Sometimes you just want to send someone a random file without needing to create an account for them and walking them through installing an app. You can use Filebrowser to generate a link that they can access to browse that specific file/directory without credentials. You can set these links to timeout after minutes/hours/days/never.
Useful to have a link to all of your services in a portable and shareable form. Very customizable and useful for most homelab assets.
For anyone interested in the configarr config I use, here you go. It’s somewhat customized to my taste (especially dubs > subs for anime) and there’s likely an issue or inconsistency or two in it that someone more familiar might be able to spot, but it works pretty well and I’d say it’s a good starting point if you just want to get going.
Note that it’s a kubernetes ConfigMap but it’s not hard to pull the relevant info into docker for your own needs.