Homelab Media Server

Intro

Hello everyone. In this tutorial I wanted to share my setup for my home automation.

It took me a while to get everything going and working properly, but I'm currently at a point where everything is working and I'm happy with the result, so I wanted to share it with you 😊

My setup

HP EliteBook G2 as my home server (running Ubuntu)
Asustor AS1004t v2 NAS for my storage (RAID5, 4x1TB HDDs)
My ISP's router.

Goal

Automatically download my media
Automatically rename the media and organize in folders
Run everything from Dockers

Copyright Notice

I will be using usenet and torrents to download shows, movies and books. I am not responsible for whatever you'll do with this setup. If piracy is illegal in your country and you're afraid of actions that can be taken by your ISP, I suggest you won't go through with it.

With that being said, you can also mask your traffic behind a VPN of your choice, which I won't be covering in this tutorial.

Apps we'll use

Radarr - managing movies
Sonarr - managing tv shows
Plex - my media player of choice. A lot of people would also recommend Jellyfin which is open-source and great as well 😊
SABnzbd - my binary newsgroup downloader of choice.
qBitTorrent - torrent downloader of choice.

How-To

Docker & Docker-Compose

I will be sharing my docker-compose file which will include all of the relevant apps for this project. You will need to install both Docker and Docker Compose on your server of choice.

Installing Docker and Docker-Compose is as simple as it gets: - Docker - Docker-Compose

NAS Setup and paths

Create a volume in your NAS. In my case, I created a RAID5 volume with 4 disks
Info
- The mount command can vary between systems.
- Don't forget to change the server's IP to yours.
- If you didn't name your folder data, change that to whatever you named your folder.
Go to your server and mount the network path.
1. run mount -o v3 192.168.1.14:/volume1/data /mnt/data
2. edit /etc/fstab to have the drive mount itself on boot: 192.168.1.14:/volume1/data /mnt/data nfs defaults 0 0
3. run mount --all

You should now see your drive mounted:

❯ df -h
Filesystem                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5                   234G   23G  200G  11% /
192.168.1.14:/volume1/data  2.7T  1.6T  1.2T  57% /mnt/data
...

Tip

From here we will be doing exactly as stated under TRaSH guides. Please more about it if you wish to understand why.

Open your mount, and create folders using the following structure:

data
├── torrents
│  ├── movies
│  └── tv
├── usenet
│  ├── movies
│  └── tv
└── media
   ├── movies
   └── tv

In the ends, once you go into /mnt/data, the folder should look like this:

beinish in Media-Server in /mnt/data
❯ ls -l
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 5 beinish          beinish          4096 Oct  4 14:04  media
drwxrwxr-x 5 beinish          beinish          4096 Oct  4 14:02  torrents
drwxrwxr-x 6 beinish          beinish          4096 Oct 19 15:36  usenet

Portainer

I chose Portainer to avoid managing my Docker containers via CLI. Installing Portainer is very simple, you can choose the method of installation from their website.

After installing it, make sure it's running:

root@server:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                          COMMAND                  CREATED       STATUS      PORTS                                                                                  NAMES             
de5b28eb2fa9   portainer/portainer-ce:2.9.3   "/portainer"             2 weeks ago   Up 9 days   0.0.0.0:8000->8000/tcp, :::8000->8000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9443->9443/tcp, :::9443->9443/tcp   portainer

Compose-File

The following docker-compose file is configured exactly as it should, we will make some changes after running it:

Information

PUID - Usually you can leave this on 1000
PGID - Same as PUID.
You can check double check by running: id $user
Under volumes, change /mnt/data:/data to reflect your setup. If you mounted /mnt/data like me, you can leave it as is.
Repeat the above step for each container that has it!
Change TZ= to reflect your timezone. You can find the value for your location here.
It doesn't matter too much where to store the config files for each container, I personally do /docker/appdata/{app}:/config. Instead of {app}, I change it to the name of the app/container I'm using.

version: "3.2"
services:
  radarr:
    container_name: radarr
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/radarr:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    logging:
      driver: json-file
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
    hostname: radarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /docker/appdata/radarr:/config
      - /mnt/data:/data

  sonarr:
    container_name: sonarr
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/sonarr:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    logging:
      driver: json-file
    ports:
      - 8989:8989
    hostname: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /docker/appdata/sonarr:/config
      - /mnt/data:/data

  bazarr:
    container_name: bazarr
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/bazarr:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    logging:
      driver: json-file
    ports:
      - 6767:6767
    hostname: bazarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /docker/appdata/bazarr:/config
      - /mnt/data/media:/data/media

  qbittorrent:
    container_name: qbittorrent
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/qbittorrent
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    hostname: qbittorrent
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - UMASK=002
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /docker/appdata/qbittorrent:/config
      - /mnt/data/torrents:/data/torrents

  plex:
    container_name: plex
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/plex
    # ports:
    #   - "32400:32400"
    hostname: plex
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - UMASK=002
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
      - PLEX_CLAIM
      - ADVERTISE_IP
      - ALLOWED_NETWORKS
      - PLEX_PASS=no
    volumes:
      - /docker/appdata/plex:/config
      - /docker/appdata/plex/transcode:/transcode
      - /mnt/data/media:/data/media

  sabnzbd:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sabnzbd:latest
    container_name: sabnzbd
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /docker/appdata:/config
      - /mnt/data/usenet:/data/usenet
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
    hostname: sabnzbd
    restart: unless-stopped

  jackett:
    container_name: jackett
    image: cr.hotio.dev/hotio/jackett
    ports:
      - "9117:9117"
    hostname: jackett
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - UMASK=002
      - TZ=Asia/Jerusalem
    volumes:
      - /docker/appdata/jackett:/config

  overseerr:
    image: sctx/overseerr:latest
    container_name: overseerr
    environment:
      - LOG_LEVEL=debug
    ports:
      - 5055:5055
    hostname: overseerr
    volumes:
      - /docker/appdata/overseerr:/app/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Apps in the compose file:

Radarr - Managing movies.
Sonarr - Managing TV shows.
Bazarr - Managing subtitles for movies and tv shows.
Plex - Media player for all of our downloads.
qBitTorrent - Torrent downloading client.
Sabnzbd - Binary newsreader, our usenet downloader.
Jackett - This is our torrent indexer. it essentialy makes queries to torrent sites and retrives the data from them to pass on to radarr/sonarr.
Overseerr - Requests manager for our media. Instead of going to any of the *arr apps, we can request media straight from this great UI.

Configure the apps

Why?

I encourage you to go an read more about Hardlinks to understand why we're configuring how media server this way.

We will be configuring the apps based on TRaSH Guides guidelines.

For Radarr, Sonarr, Sabnzbd and qBittorrent, make sure you configure it as listed here.