Sonarr – TV Show Management Server

Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better quality format becomes available.

This walk through will consist of the stack deployment and some basic configuration of the interface.

Prerequisites

I will be setting this up on Portainer utilizing Docker containers running on Ubuntu 22.04.1. Here are my setup guide for all of those pieces of software:

Next, you will need to mount your folder shares onto the base servers so the container will be able to access them. You will need the main folder where your TV Shows are stored and if you use a server to download content, you will need access to the folder where the downloader stores the finished files. Here is a guide for mounting the shared folders.

Automatically Mount a Windows Share on a Linux Server

(Optional) You will need to setup a indexing server and a download client server to link to the Sonarr server. Here are my walk throughs for setting up Jackett and Transmission.

Deployment

---
version: "3.8"
services:
  sonarr:
    image: linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    volumes:
      - /home/{username}/config/sonarr/config:/config
      - /mnt/plex/tv shows:/tv #tv show directory
      - /mnt/torrent:/downloads #downloads directory
    ports:
      - {port number}:8989
    restart: always

Stuff to change for your deployment:

Version – This is be determined by the version of Docker you are running on your server. You can find this by entering the command “docker -v”. Here is a link to the Compatibility Matrix.
Image – You can do “latest” and it will pull the current version. I prefer to look up the actual tag for the current version. This adds a little more management to updating however pinning it to a specific version adds reliability. Here is a link to the Sonarr Tag page.
PUID and PGID – These numbers are specific to the user account you are running the container under. The Root user is “0” for both. You can find this for your user by logging into your server and running the “id” command.
TZ – Update this to be your Time Zone. Here is a link to a list of all Time Zones.
Volumes – The first mapping you need for sure, this is where all the persistant configuration files for the Sonarr container will be stored. Update the information with your username or change the location before the “:” to a location of your choosing. The next mapping is the location of your media library. You will want this mapped to the root location of all your show folders. The final mapping will be to your download directory if you choose to do automatic downloading.
Ports – You will want to update this to a port that works well inside your environment. It will be the port that you connect to the web interface of the container.
Restart – You will want to set this to the way you want docker to handle the restarting of the container. Here is a link to the Restart Policies to choose from. I prefer “always” so if it crashes or the server restarts, it will automatically restart the container.

Configure Sonarr

Now that your Sonarr container is deployed, lets connect to it and make some configuration changes.

Open your web browser and navigate to “http://{server name or IP}:{port you configured in the stack}”.

You should see a page that looks like this with 3 “errors” under the system status:

Import Your Media

Lets start by importing your current shows. If you followed my instructions to mount your media library onto the server, we will now point Sonarr at that mapped path.

Click on “Import Existing Series”

Read over the tips for importing your content and click on “Start Import”

Because we mapped our media folder to the “/tv” folder inside the docker container, we will want to find that folder, not the mnt folder. Click on it and you should see the full folder structure of all your TV Shows. If that is what you see, click “Ok” in the bottom right corner.

Back on the main Library Import page, we want to click on the new “/tv” root folder. This will take us to the import page. Let it process all your TV Shows, this will take a little time based on how many shows you currently have. When its finished go through all the shows and make sure the show matches the “Series” column that you would expect for that show (year and platform). After everything looks good, you can also mass edit setting at the bottom. I don’t use Season folders so I uncheck that box and click “Import xx Series”.

After it finishes importing, you should be taken to a screen that says “All series in /tv have been imported. You will then also see it going through and scanning all the shows in the bottom left corner.

It will take a while depending on how many shows you are importing to go through and pull all the metadata for them. Let it proccess and come back when its all finished. Once it is finished, go through all your shows and make sure it pulled all the correct information. If you have shows that are wrong, you can delete them, just dont delete the files, and re-import them with the correct information.

Change Settings

We need to go through and change a bunch of quality of life settings so the server behaves the way we want. Start by going to “Settings > Media Management”.

We want to check the box next to “Renames Expisodes”. This will allow us to tell the server how to name new files based on episode number and title. Here is an example of what I use for my file names:

Standard Episode Format:
{Series Title} - S{season:00}E{episode:00} - {Episode Title}
Daily Episode Format:
{Series Title} - {Air-Date} - {Episode Title}
Anime Episode Format
{Series Title} - S{season:00}E{episode:00} - {Episode Title}

I also change the “Multi-Episode Style” from Extend to Range.

Thats all I change under Media Management. Click “Save Changes” at the top to continue.

Next, we will go to “Settings > General”. Scroll down to the “Security” section. We will change the “Authentication” to “Forms (Login Page)”. Enter a Username and Password to be used to authenticate to the web interface. Since this is an internal server, I also Disable the Certificate Validation. You can also uncheck the box to “Send Anonymous Usage Data” if you choose to. Click “Save Changes” at the top to continue.

You will get a pop up prompting you that Sonarr will need to be Restarted.

Click “Restart Now”, wait for about 10 seconds and refresh your browser. You should now get the Login screen. Enter the username and password you just set to login.

Configure Indexers

If you are wanting to use this to automatically download new episodes and followed my instructions on deploying Jackett as a Indexer, we will now connect Sonarr to it. If you setup multiple sites to pull information from, you will need to setup each one even if they are on the same Jackett server.

Navigate to “Settings > Indexers” and click on the + under the list of Indexers.

For Jackett, we are going to select “Torznab”.

Enter the “Name” to describe the indexer. (ex. The Pirate Bay (Jackett))

For the “URL”, we need to go over to our Jackett server and click “Copy Torznab Feed” next to the Indexer you setup.

For the “API Key”, this is located in the top right corner of the Jackett page.

If you are using multiple Indexer sites, you can set the “Indexer Priority” to better narrow down searches. 1 is highest priority, 50 is the lowest.

At the bottom of the page, click the “Test” button. As long as you get a green check mark, you are good to click the “Save” botton to continue. If you get a Red “!”, scroll up to see what the error is. I had some issues with using a FQDN for the url. If you get this same error, try putting the IP address of the server instead.

Configure Download Clients

If you are wanting to use this to automatically download new episodes and followed my instructions on deploying Transmission as a Download Client, we will now connect Sonarr to it.

Navigate to “Settings > Download Clients” and click on the + under the list of Download Clients.

Scroll down and click on “Transmission”.

Enter the “Name” to describe the client. (ex. Transmission over PIA)

Enter the “Host” address of the server running the Transmission container. I use IP address instead of FQDN to make sure I don’t have any issues.

Enter the “Port” which will be the web UI port number.

Enter the Username and Password you configured for the web UI.

Change “Recent Priority” to “First”. This will make any new shows aired the highest priority. This works well if you are using this server to download old TV shows that are harder to get seeded.

If you followed my instructions and deployed my stacks, there is one other thing we need to set for the Download Client to work. We need to add a “Remote Path Mapping” at the bottom of the Download Client page. This will insure that the folder structure that Sonarr sees is the same folder structure that Transmission uses. Here is what I add to my setup to get everything to work:

The paths reflect the mapped paths inside each container to the /mnt/torrent folder.

Optional Improvements

There are a few improvment settings I like to change to make the system more autonomous.

First, because of the newer h.265 encoding file sizes and bandwidth for some videos has gone more efficient and compressed compared to the older h.264 encoding. This will cause an error because its under the minimum default level. To change this setting, go into “Settings > Quality”, find the “WEBDL-720p” and “WEBDL-1080p” and change the “Min” level to “1”. This fix pretty much all of my downloads. If you have issues with different profiles, you just have to figure out what profile its classifying the media as and lower the “Min” level for that one as well.

Second, you can setup “Release Profiles” which allows you to automatically search the indexers using key words. I personally like to get my tv shows in the newer h.265 formate because it saves on space and all of my devices are able to stream it. The way I found to filter my automatic searches for this is by setting up a release profile so that it “Must Contain” – “x265”. this is what most titles that have h.265 encoding in their file name. I then set the “Tags” for this release profile to “x265” and apply that tag to all my Series using the Mass Editor. Doing it this way, you will still be able to search for non h.265 content but the automatic downloads will be restricted.

I hope this helps everyone get Sonarr up and running on their own system and gets you through some of the “gotcha’s” that I had to spend time figuring out.

Stay tuned becasue shortly I’ll be publishing a walk through on a container called “Overseerr” which allows for central management of Sonarr and gives you the ability to allow other people that stream from your system an interface to request new content.

Sonarr

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