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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[–] the_artic_one@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

I wanted to get started without having to learn a bunch of Linux networking and docker stuff so I used this pre-built mediastack compose file.

Then I spent weeks fixing all the problems with it, upgrading the outdated packages that they pinned, sorting through the outdated/incomplete setup docs, and disabling the apps I don't need (so many monitoring dashboards without config instructions). Now I know a bunch of Linux networking and docker stuff.

I'd still recommend mediastack as a reference just because it's a good example of how to set up secure internet access (the diagrams of the network architecture are great) but their "full download vpn" config is overkill (most of this stuff doesn't really need to be accessible from the Internet in the first place) and even their "mini download vpn" unnecessarily puts the Usenet download client (SABnzbd) in a VPN.

I've seen a few folks mention trash guides, while they're great, their quality settings weren't written for current hard drive prices so you might want to skip the part where you crank up all your preferred bitrates to the maximum.

One thing I added which is haven't seen mentioned yet is Tunarr to create live tv channels for shows I like to have on in the background. It's great when it works but it's in active development so I frequently have issues with it. Thankfully the devs are responsive and helpful.