Setting up Radarr with Plex Media Server

One of the most time-consuming aspects of maintaining a Plex server is keeping your media organized and keeping track of upcoming episodes and movie releases. This guide will focus on a tool to automate that process for movies.

Disclosure: This guide in no way condones nor promotes piracy. Where you get your media is your choice, and while the tools in this guide are capable of “snatching” media from legally-questionable sources, this guide simply walks through the setup of those tools to facilitate the (re)organization of media you already have, and media you add later.

Tools We’ll Be Using:

• Radarr – a fork of Sonarr for movies

Requirements:

• Git
• Python 2.7

As usual, this guide is written for Ubuntu 14.01+ and will assume you’ve gone through the previous guides, Getting Started with Plex and Using Amazon Cloud Drive with Plex Media Server on Ubuntu… And Encrypting It!, otherwise you’ll need to substitute your own directories and usernames. I’m also assuming you’ve run through our Sonarr guide over here. If you have and still have CouchPotato installed, you can go ahead and shut it down for good after setting Radarr up. Let’s get started!

Radarr Installation/Configuration

Step 2.1 – Downloading/Installing Radarr

If you’ve already installed Sonarr, go ahead and skip installing mono. If not, start off by installing a required package called Mono:

sudo apt-get install -y mono-devel

Make sure it installed properly in the right directory by typing:

which mono

This command should return “/usr/bin/mono” as the binary path. Now you’ll have to download the latest (at the time of this post) Radarr release and unpack it:

cd ~/downloads
wget "https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr/releases/download/v0.2.0.453/Radarr.develop.0.2.0.453.linux.tar.gz" 
tar xvzf "Radarr.develop.0.2.0.453.linux.tar.gz"

And now we can move the unpacked “Radarr” directory over to ‘/opt’ and take ownership

sudo mv Radarr /opt/
sudo chown -R plex:plex /opt/Radarr

Step 2.2 – Start Radarr Automatically at Boot

Let’s go ahead and create a systemd config file for Radarr:

mkdir /opt/Radarr/init
nano /opt/Radarr/init/radarr.service

And when Nano is open, copy and paste the following text:

[Unit]
Description=Radarr Daemon
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
User=plex
Group=plex

Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mono /opt/Radarr/Radarr.exe -nobrowser
TimeoutStopSec=20
KillMode=process
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Press “CTRL+X” and “Y” to save the file, and then copy it to your systemd directory and enable it for startup at boot:

sudo cp /opt/Radarr/init/radarr.service /lib/systemd/system/radarr.service
sudo systemctl enable radarr.service

Now let’s start Radarr, but first we will open the required port on our firewall:

sudo ufw allow 7878
sudo systemctl start radarr.service

And let’s make sure it’s running:

sudo systemctl status radarr.service

If you see “active (running)” then everything is all set! Open your browser to “http://localhost:7878” and click the “Settings” icon on the top menu. Go over to the “General” tab, and change the “Authentication” drop-down to “Basic” or “Forms” then create a username and password for accessing Radarr. That’s it! You can look through the options available here and configure Radarr however you’d like. There’s even an option to bulk-import existing movies and import your CouchPotato wanted list. Remember, this program is still in development, so some small things may not work, but for the most part Radarr is functional and easier to use once you’ve got the hang of Sonarr.

Now that Radarr is up and running, why not check out our Script Hub? To get the most from those scripts, be sure to set up Amazon Cloud Drive with encryption on PMS first!

Wrap-Up

Now that you’ve got Sonarr and Radarr both set up, and I’m guessing you’ve already set up what brought you to this blog in the first place, Amazon Cloud Drive, head over to the Script Hub to check out some useful scripts I’ve developed over my time tinkering with Plex and get things running like a well-oiled machine!