Howdy folks!

I was speaking to the denizens of the chatbox the other day when I mentioned SOnarr and got the equivalent of strange looks from people. After explaining what it was, I decided a short tutorial may be in order. (short- HA!) I will say there is a great guide here that also tells you about usenet groups, if you're into that sort of thing. (and which I totally stole a lot of this from)

More into videos? Try this one.



Oh, you're cool, and like to read? AWESOME!
Let's start with the basics- Sonarr will search multiple trackers for seasons of a TV show. It doesn't do movies, that's what Radarr is for (and an entirely different thread!) So, if you want to stay up to date on the latest Yak Weaving show, "Yak Weavers International," you would simply put the name of the show in its series manager, and it would automatically search and download that show for you! What's more is that it knows that some places like to name their episodes in weird ways, or add on extra things like CECILSXTRASPECIAL into the file name. That's ok! Sonarr will go right ahead and get it anyway, and throw it into the folder you told it to.

Have I sold you on this yet? If not, I'll try harder next time. If so- read on!

Download the installer from their site. When installing, make sure you leave Install as a Windows service checked. When it's done installing, double-click the Sonarr icon on the desktop.

Now, before you go getting all happy and everything, you need to first actually set up things. The first thing we need to do is switch to the development branch of the software to get torrent support. Click the General tab and set the Advanced Settings slider to Shown. Scroll to the bottom and change Branch from master to develop. While we're on this page, let's change our Port Number to 38082, Switch Authentication to On and enter a username and password.

Scroll back to the top and click the Save button.

You can now update to the development branch by clicking the System button, switching to the Updates tab, and click Install for the top version. Now wait a minute while it updates. You will see progress modals pop up in the lower right corner. Since we changed the port, the interface will stop responding when it finishes. Fix this by navigating to http://localhost:38082/system/updates. Once authenticated, you will see that there is a check mark next to the version. We can now get back to tweaking the settings (and oh boy is there a lot to change).

Click the Settings button again. Make sure the Advanced Settings slider is set to Shown. We pretty much need to change everything, so just go down the list and make the changes.

Media Management tab

• Switch Rename Episodes to Yes
• Change Season Folder Format to Season {season:00}
• Change Create empty series folders to Yes
• Change Ignore Deleted Episodes to Yes
• Profiles tab

You will need to tweak it to however you prefer. These Profiles dictate the quality that your shows download in.

Indexers tab
We need to start adding in our indexers.

Before we do that though, we need another program to help- Jackett.

To get started with using the installer for Jackett, follow the steps below:

Download the latest version of the Windows installer, "Jackett.Installer.Windows.exe" from the releases page.
When prompted if you would like this app to make changes to your computer, select "yes".
If you would like to install Jackett as a Windows Service, make sure the "Install as Windows Service" checkbox is filled.
Once the installation has finished, check the "Launch Jackett" box to get started.
Navigate your web browser to: http://127.0.0.1:9117
You're now ready to begin adding your trackers and using Jackett.
When installed as a service the tray icon acts as a way to open/start/stop Jackett. If you opted to not install it as a service then Jackett will run its web server from the tray tool.

Jackett can also be run from the command line if you would like to see log messages (Ensure the server isn't already running from the tray/service). This can be done by using "JackettConsole.exe" (for Command Prompt), found in the Jackett data folder: "%ProgramData%\Jackett".

Once you have Jackett up and running, setting it up is fairly easy. You simply open the Web interface, and add in the tracker of choice. Since there are a bajillion trackers listed, it should be pretty intuitive to figure this part out. Once you have your indexers listed, it's time to move on to the next step

Ok, you're still in settings, right?

Go to indexers at the top.
Click the giant + sign.
Click Torznab, custom (unless one of the ones you have is listed like IPT or TL)
Now, using the info from jackett, you can past the API key right here! The url is also linked in Jackett very nicely and allows you to just copy it right on over to Sonarr.

Once you have this all straightened out, click on the Test button to make sure it works.

Now do this a bajillion times- one for each tracker you have.

Download Client tab
This is pretty self explanatory. You're going to put in your download client (qbitorrent, deluge, utor, etc)


That really is all there is to it! Super duper easy, and once you have it going you won't have to worry about messing with it again.