What are the Media Server Applications?

In order to retrieve content for your media server, you’ll need to install a collection of applications. I’m going to focus on Sonarr (which is used to signal which shows or series you want to retrieve) and Radarr (which is used to signal which movies you want to retrieve). These have dependencies on sabnzbd and transmission for locating and downloading nzb via usenet and torrents via bittorrent respectively.

The Strategy

All of these applications are available via Docker and can be installed individually. However, this is a HUGE pain in the butt. There are 5 applications that need to be installed and configured. Sonarr and Radarr have dependencies on Sabnzbd and Transmission and we’ll be installing Jackett as well (which Transmission has a dependency on).

In order to manage all of this and also allow us to quickly stand up and configure the docker containers we’ll be using docker compose. This is a tool built on docker that allows you to define a set of containers that need to be managed together, but also allows us to define a common configuration file which we can use to build a template for deploying our container set anywhere we like (Raspberry Pi, for example).

Sabnzbd

We’re going to start with Sabnzbd because its the easiest one to get started with. It does involve some cost as we’ll need to subscribe to both a usenet service as well as an nzb indexer. However, since its more secure, we won’t need to use a VPN to download which makes it much faster than torrents.

Radarr

Once we have a channel for retrieving content, we’ll setup and configure Radarr to use Sabnzbd to locate and download content. This will confirm that one of our paths for retrieving content is setup correctly.

BitTorrent

We’re also going to use setup transmission to support downloading content via bittorrent. For this we’ll need a VPN to hide our traffic as well as Jackett which will be used to manage our torrent indexers.

Sonarr

At this point we’ll setup our other content manager for tv shows and series. We’ll configure both Sabnzbd and Transmission. Finally, we’ll add Bittorrent to Radarr.

Reverse Proxy

When we’re almost done we’ll have a bunch of ports that we can use to hit all of our services. This is kind of ugly and a pain to remember, so we’ll use Synology’s built in reverse proxy server to manage the routes to our media content services.