this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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How does one get started with the *arr stack? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by goddard_guryon@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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!

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[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It depends on whether you want to use torrents or have a usenet subscription. You'd do well to look at TRaSH guides, save yourself a lot of headaches if you structure the container's directory structures in the way the guides suggest and then you can just use Prowlarr to manage the actual download requests and send them to your torrent or usenet client.

I use Jellyfin and I suggest you do the same, but honestly you could use whatever you feel like, the *arr stack is going to put everything in the proper folder structure and naming convention so by and large your media server app should be pretty plug and play, just point it at the proper folder and get to scanning.

[–] goddard_guryon@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Ha! That sounds like the exact thing I was looking for. I'll go through the guide and see how well it turns out. Thanks!