Deep Dive: Making Sonarr Work So You Don’t Have To!

Alright, this is probably the most requested guide of all. Sonarr is probably one of the best tools to use in conjunction with Plex Media Server, so it’s best to take advantage of every ability it has to offer. In this guide, we are going to focus on the following areas:

• Managing an existing media collection
• Renaming/moving media files
• Integrating Sonarr with PMS
• Automatically running scripts upon media import

With these tasks being automated by Sonarr, you’ll find yourself spending a lot less time tinkering with your PMS and more time enjoying your media collection! Let’s get started. This guide will be using the file paths from our other guide, Using Amazon Cloud Drive with Plex Media Server on Ubuntu… And Encrypting It! So, if you haven’t used that guide to set up your media directories, you’ll have to substitute your own here.

Open Sonarr in a browser with “:8989” and read on…

Step 1 – Managing an existing media collection

Starting Fresh

If you haven’t started using Sonarr yet, go ahead and either add a new series or start importing from disk. When you select your first series, you’ll have to choose a path. Browse to ‘/home/plex/media/TV Shows’ in the path field. This is so all your renamed shows get put into this directory and are able to be uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive later on.

Importing Series from Disk

If you haven’t started using Sonarr yet, but you’ve already TV media on your server, you can start off with the “Import series from disk” option. Go ahead and choose your root TV folder, and Sonarr will take care of matching everything up.

Changing the Default Path

If you’ve already started using Sonarr and have series imported, but you’ve followed our previous guides this far, let’s change the default root path for your existing series. Click the “Series Editor” button on the “Series” page, then click the top-left checkbox to select all your series. In the drop-down menu under “Root Folder” select “Add a different path” and browse to ‘/home/plex/media/TV Shows’ and hit “Save.” This is so all your renamed shows get put into this directory and are able to be uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive later on.

Step 2 – Setting up Renaming

Enable File Renaming

To enable renaming of episodes, click the settings icon at the top of the Sonarr web page, then click the “Media Management” tab. Find the button for “Rename Episodes” and turn it on. I typically keep the default settings here, but you can change the naming conventions to whatever you like. PMS works just fine with the defaults.

Enable Upgrading Episodes

You’ll want to enable advanced settings to make the next change

Towards the bottom of the page, find the “File Management” section. Enable the “Download propers” option to ensure you’ve got the best releases for each episode.

Step 3 – Integrating Sonarr with PMS

Next, let’s get Sonarr and PMS talking to eachother. Well, just Sonarr talking to PMS. Sonarr don’t take no orders… Except from you, of course. So open the Sonarr settings, and go to the “Connect” tab. Add a new connection, and choose the “Plex Media Server” option. Go ahead and fill this out with your PMS information, using the options in the image below:

Now Sonarr can let PMS know when to scan the TV library after new items are added.

Step 4 – Automate rclone Uploading with Scripts

There is an updated version of the script specified below over at the new Script Hub!

And here is the crown jewel of this Sonarr guide; fully automating the uploading and cleaning up of your local files. I know you’ll want to dive right in:

Writing the Script

First thing we’ll have to do is write a script to handle all the legwork. Get into your scripts directory we created a few guides back, then start a new script called “uploadTV.sh” with Nano:

cd ~/scripts
nano uploadTV.sh

And go ahead and paste in the following script. If you haven’t followed our guide “Converting your Media to MP4 for Universal Playback” for converting your media (this guide isn’t finished yet, but if you plan on completing it, just place a “#” in front of those italicized lines), or don’t want to automatically convert your episodes to MP4, don’t copy the italicized lines below, just start copying at the “Uploading to ACD” line:

#!/bin/sh

echo "Converting video if needed"

/usr/bin/python /home/plex/sickbeard_mp4_automator/manual.py -i "${sonarr_episodefile_path}" -tv ${sonarr_series_tvdbid} -s ${sonarr_episodefile_seasonnumber} -e ${sonarr_episodefile_episodenumbers}

echo "Uploading to ACD"

/usr/sbin/rclone copy /home/plex/.local/L,ULJSSLPjETMTzk5OhzCioC/ acd:Plex/L,ULJSSLPjETMTzk5OhzCioC && rm -Rf "/home/plex/local/TV Shows/"*

exit

The text in red should equal the name of your encrypted “TV Shows” directory as it appears in your ‘/home/plex/.local’ directory.

Make the script executable:

chmod +x uploadTV.sh

Connecting the Script in Sonarr

First, you’ll have to enable completed download handling in Sonarr. Go to the Sonarr web portal, click the “Download Client” tab, and turn on “Completed download handling.”

Click over to the “Connect” tab, add a new connection, and choose the “Custom Script” option. Enter the information as follows:

Save that connection, and that’s it! Sonarr will now invoke this script after renaming and moving your file, uploading it to ACD and emptying the local “TV Shows” folder when it’s finished.

Wrap-Up

So that takes care of TV show automation. The next guide will focus on movie automation with CouchPotato and aim to accomplish the same type of task process. When Sonarr and CouchPotato are working in a fully-automated fashion, we will set up PlexRequests to allow our Plex friends to request media, and you won’t even have to lift a finger to get that media downloaded, uploaded, and available on Plex! Unless you want to, that is. As always, feel free to drop a comment below if you’re running into any issues, or leave me a message on Reddit. Thanks for reading!