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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You should be able to find tutorials on YouTube or follow the TRaSH guide. You don’t need to expose this stuff to the internet, only your download client like Qbittorrent. For movies and TV, all you’d need is a download client + VPN, sonarr (TV), radarr (movies), Prowlarr (handles indexers/trackers), and possibly Jellyseer for requests from you or those you share with in a single UI. There are other *arrs for music (Lidarr), books, porn, etc too. Lidarr can integrate with SoulSeek if thats what you’re using to fill content for Navidrome, but you would use Jellyfin as the media player.
Yes they’ll integrate well with Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. You just paste API keys from one to another to allow them to communicate.
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.
