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Initial Setup and Configuration

In this guide, we’ll be setting up Sonarr for the first time. This guide assumes that that this is your first time installing Sonarr and you'll be storing your media locally, saving to ~/media. We'll be doing the following:

  1. Enabling automatic organization and adding a root Folder
  2. Adding indexers
  3. Connecting your download clients
  4. Adding your first series

Initial Setup

Enabling Automatic Organization and Add Root Folder

  • Access and login to your Sonarr instance using the credentials you set during installation
  • Go to Settings

  • Make sure that advanced settings is set to Shown and click Media Management

  • Under Episode Naming section check Rename Episodes
    • You can leave the rest of the options as-is. The defaults work well with Plex's naming scheme.

  • Under Importing section Makemake sure that Use hardlinks instead of copy is checked,checked
    • Hardlinks effectively creates a file that points directly to your source file.file in the disk. You can do anything to this file without affecting your source filtfile and vice versa. This is useful when you're seeding from torrents.
      • This is to prevent to have 2 copies of the same movie without affecting your files.
      • If your root folder is located on a mount (eg using a rclone mount), you should set this to No.No.
        • Hardlinks does not work on mounts. Sonarr will resort to copying, which is prone to errors.

  • Then on Root Folders, select Add Root Folder

  • This will bring up the File Browser window.
  • Select homexx folder where homexx contains the node where your seedbox is in.
    • In the screenshot, the node where the seedbox is onin home1
    • It may vary but always select the homexx folder

  • Once opened, select your seedbox (indicated by your seedbox username)

  • Then select the media folder and select TV Shows. Click OK after.
    • This folder is generated upon receiving your seedbox. This is where you'll be saving your media.

 

  • Once that's done, click OK.OK. You'll see the absolute path of the Root folder. 

  • Click Save changes to save your changes

Adding indexers

  • Now click the Indexers tab (red box)
  • Add an indexer by clicking the big plus button (Blue box) and input what is asked on each indexer you wish.
    • Depending on the indexer, it'll ask for your account credentials or a passkey. Refer to your indexer/tracker for more information on what to put.

  • Once that's done, click save changes.changes.

Adding Download Clients

  • Now, click the Download client tab

  • To add your preferred client, click the big + button then select your preferred client.

For connection details on each client, you may refer to this guide: Download Client Connection Details

Adding Your First Series

  • To add a series, click Series

  • Then click Add New Series

  • This page will be shown. Search and select the series that you wish to grab.

  • Once selected, you can change if you want to monitor the series for any new releases, your preferred quality profile, and the series type.
  • Once that's done, you can click the green button to add it to your Sonarr.
    • If you want to immediately search for the series in your indexers, check Start search for missing episodes.

 

Settings Overview

Media Management

  • Here, you can set Sonarr's organization options. The following can be set here:\
    • Episode naming scheme
    • Folder options
    • Importing options
    • File Management
    • Permissions
    • Sonarr Root Folders

Profiles

  • Here, you can edit profiles for different resolutions.
  • Each profile you can set which resolution you'd like to grab, the cutoff to which you'll set Sonarr to stop grabbing releases of that episode and any custom formats you've wished to grab.
  • Here, you can set Language profiles to filter out releases that are in your specified language
    • You can also set Release profiles and Delay profiles
      • Release profiles fine tunes the releases that Sonarr grabs with RegEx.
        • By specifying a number of terms, Sonarr will filter out more releases and continue to watch for releases that better match your preferences.
      • Delay profiles are also helpful if you want to emphasize one protocol (Usenet or Torrent) over the other

Quality

  • Here, this is where you'll control the size limits of each resolution. Anything that's not within the set limits will be rejected from the releases.

Indexers

  • This is where Sonarr will grab releases from. You can set your preferred tracker and/or usenet indexers.
  • You may also set some options on how frequent you check your torrents, your torrent minimum age and set your restrictions.

Download Clients

  • This is where you'll set your download clients and how Sonarr handles completed and failed downloads.
  • This is also where you can set your Remote Path Mappings.

Connect

  • Here, you can set integrations to other apps which will trigger actions from Sonarr.
  • Most popular apps that you can integrate with are
    • Plex
    • Emby/Jellyfin
    • Execute custom Scripts
    • Slack notifications

Metadata

  • This is where you can generate metadata (NFO) files to be used by some applications. It holds information on the media you downloaded such as Show name, Season, Banner/Poster links, Description, etc. which is read and displayed by the application for you.
  • All of our supported media center apps can generate its own metadata files so there's no real need to enable one of the options although, it'll speed up library rescanning since it won't need to search and match metadata from online sources.

Tags

  • Here, it'll list your set tags.
  • Tags are used to bind Restrictions and Delay Profiles to specific series,series

General

  • Here, you can change the general settings of Sonarr.
  • Most are set by USB so you can leave them as-is.
  • Should there be a need to do so, you can change Log Level.

UI

  • Here, you can change UI settings.

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