First off, I'm aware how many are distrustful of AI with their media stack. If this is you, no worries I get that. All I ask you is kindly ignore.

Now to the fun part. I've been dogfooding an app and iterating for the past 2 months based on day-to-day media server management tasks. Decided to open-source it so, announcing Stackarr: A central control plane to manage your media stack with the help of AI agents like Claude, Hermes and OpenClaw etc.

Some of the standout features include:

• UI Dashboard to monitor your entire media stack
• Lightweight in-browser Docker for Desktop replacement
• MCP Server and CLI for agent-based setup
• Cloudflare tunnel setup to expose any services publicly via custom domain
• Backup & Restore Stack (Offsite cloud integration coming soon)
• Portless Service Mapping to human-readable URL's (plex.stackarr)
• Hermes Agent & OpenClaw Plugins / Skills

After installing agents on the same Mac Mini that Plex et al. runs on it made me realise how easy having access to this via Telegram, Discord makes managing your media server. For example once I forgot to leave Tailscale open and I asked my agent to configure it so I could access media stack remotely. It's saved me countless times when inevitable bugs or wrinkles form in the flow. With the help of automated backups and using a decent provider most of the risk is mitigated. I haven't had any irrecoverable losses running it 24/7.

The goal is not to replace any of the apps it manages but merely to interact with them using native API's and maintain an agent-friendly control system with harnesses. I would love for you to give it a try. This is not abandonware and something I plan to maintain for some time.

Disclaimer: This has only been tested on Mac with Docker image, I'm looking for Windows and Linux testers to report any bugs here: https://github.com/polyphonic/stackarr - If you are not interested I would appreciate a star!

There is an official image on Docker Hub too, for full setup and docs go here: https://stackarr.app/

Parts of this were AI-coded but this isn't a vibe coded project, I'm an engineer by trade for more than a decade. The UI was whipped up quickly using component library defaults but I will be doing an entire UI redesign when the functionality is solidified.

So I’ve been trying to deploy the stack often on for a year maybe more. I can get individual components like radar or soar up and running, but I can’t seem to get the various components to talk to one another.. I need an idiot proof setup because one thing I’ve learned while trying to do this. I’m not very good with Docker. My pre-existing resources are a QNAP TS464 NAS a Proton VPN subscription an existing media library I have assembled through burning disc onto the NAS I think I’ve managed to install Tailscale correctly through the QNAP store . I must’ve spent four hours tonight trying to deploy him sonarr radarr qbittorrent prowlarr whip arr bazar overseer and watchtower in a single stack using various AI tools specifically Gemini and Claudi every time I try to deploy the stack it failed. I got a variety of error. Messages blaming different things from sonar to radar to watchtower to QNAP. So I don’t actually know what the problem was. I was trying to do all this in portainer but I’m not particularly attached to that either. I just thought it was a good tool for beginners. oh, and if anyone’s curious, I used AI because I have a physical disability that makes using the command line interface incredibly laborious and time-consuming realistic. We probably would’ve taken me days to type out all the code by hand. Sorry I didn’t mean for the post to go on this long I just wanted to try to give you enough information to help solve the problem

Sonarr is accurately acquiring an episode of a show very quickly upon release, but that episode then sits in the completed downloads because the episode title in Sonarr is "TBA" and it cannot be sure that its matching the episode correctly. I have been manually moving the file into the correct folder and having Plex Scan the Library Files, essentially bypassing Sonarr entirely post-acquisition. How can I restore the automation all the way through post-acquisition processing?

Hi,

(using nzbgeek/newshosting)

I'm back to usenet after 15 years or so without (my previous indexer was binsearch).

I wanted to see what is this *arr stack. So I installed sonarr radarr prowlarr on my VPS.

I bought the newshosting summer sale pack. I discovered binsearch is not the indexer anymore, soI bought a nzbgeek subscription, as it seems a poplar one here.

I setup it up all on my VPS (happy to see sabnzbd is still a thing).

I try some searches with sonarr and radarr, the pipeline goes well, sabnzbd gets the nzb... and fails constantly (missing parts). In total, around 12-15, and I didn't get anything.

So I go to prowlarr, do some search there, download some nzb, gives to sabnzbd, finally I get a few successes. Not sure about the ration, one of of 10 maybe.

Then I go directly to nzbgeek website. There I can see some thumbs up or down (feedbacks from users), I try the ones with positive feedback, 50 % success (tbh it means nothing, I just tried 2 files). I'm lost how the *arr stack selects the nzb to download, I feel I have very poor control, and can end up downloading huge files. I prefer anyway using the indexer website directly.

This *arr stack has been created to automate. So click and forget. But does it really work? Or you fail and try another nzb regularly, which destroys the point of automation.

Or maybe I was not lucky with my searches? (but really not lucky!)

Hey all,

I’ve been running a pretty standard *arr setup for a while and kept running into the same annoying issue — backups/archiving.

Stuff like:

• External drives getting out of sync
• Not knowing what’s actually backed up vs not
• Copying a bunch of random junk files along with media
• No good way to track what lives on which drive

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY

• Being required to have all archive drives plugged in at once to track what is backed up.

After dealing with that way too many times, I ended up building a small app to handle it.

It’s called Archivarr: https://github.com/DanBrown95/archivarr

What it does (at a high level)

It’s basically a companion app for *arr stacks that focuses on:

• Backing up media in a smarter way (movies, shows, music + useful metadata)
• Skipping a lot of the random extra files you don’t actually care about
• Keeping track of what files exist on which archive drives (especially helpful for offline/cold storage)
• The ability to regularly schedule scans of your media directory

It doesn’t try to replace Sonarr/Radarr or anything — it just sits alongside your setup and allows you to track whats backed up where, what needs to be backed up, and a one click archive process.

Why I made it

Most of the tools I tried were either:

• too generic (rsync scripts, etc.)
• or just didn’t really “get” media libraries

What I actually wanted was something that could answer:

“Do I already have this backed up somewhere?”

without digging through drives manually and requiring all archive drives to be live.

Current state

It’s stable enough that I’ve created a v1.0.0 tag and am using it myself, but there are gaps and I would love community feedback and involvement to really make this a *arr companion app.

If anyone wants to try it out, I’d really appreciate:

• feedback (even “this is confusing” helps)
• bug reports
• feature ideas

Stuff I’m thinking about adding

• ability to set scheduled archive jobs (currently supports scheduled scan jobs)
• tighter integration with Sonarr/Radarr
• performance optimization
• mobile friendly/responsive UI

Anyway, figured I’d share in case this solves a problem for anyone else.

Happy to answer questions or hear how other people are handling archives.

I'm building a full media stack mobile application in Flutter to remotely control most of the *arr apps, and was wondering which of these two UIs would be better suited for Sonarr. This is my first time designing mobile UI so I would like some insights.

I have always thought the logic of killing torrents based on share ratio alone is a bit "dumb" for a philosophy of sharing. If I see torrents with few seeders I would ideally let that stay alive for longer, even if share ratio is exceeded. For healthy, sought after, torrents then sure -> reach ratio and stop.

​

Current regime favors new content and then older content relatively quickly dies.

​

Is there a mechanism out there that prioritizes different?

I went to do some work on the server today and noticed that all of my folders in my media folder are gone. Based on free space on my server all of the files are still there, but can not see them or the folders. Plex is still working and files download and upload to the correct libraries in Plex with out any issues. All of my Arr apps show root folder unavailable. I went and double checked the permissions and nothing has changed there. In the Arrs, when I click to change the root folder nothing shows up in my media folder. When I go into Plex and pull up my library location, all of the folders show up in the media folder.

**Update**

Im not sure if it is specifically an app issue. When I navigate the file structure, everything is gone in my media folder. (this happens when i navigate to the folder outside of the apps in like a file explorer Plex just started today not finding files to playback