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!
I haven’t tried any out-of-the-box solution or setup script, so I can’t talk about them. if you go diy or want to edit any solution to have internet access exclusively over VPN (or not at all otherwise), I can recommend gluetun. Other than that, I just have a simple docker compose file and a reverse proxy. I recommend not exposing it to the www, but to keep it only accessible in your local network, or tailscale, if your use case allows it. Note: if you set up https, you might be leaking your subdomains in permanent certificate transparency records.
So this is a part I’ve stumbled on for now. I do host a bunch of other stuff which I share with a few friends, so using tailscale was, for me, a bigger hassle than worth. But now that prowlarr requires a VPN connection for security, I’m on the crossroads on whether to push tailscale for everyone or figure out VPN for just prowlarr. But I suppose that’s what gluetun is for? I’ll take a look into it anyway, thanks!
Having Prowlarr behind a VPN is not recommended, as some trackers ban VPN use. Instead have Prowlarr on the host network, and route individual trackers via Gluetun’s http proxy.