And It’s All Thanks To Portainer And Servarr

Not that long ago I moved my Home Assistant server from my old Mac mini to my new Raspberry Pi. The main reason for this is that the spinning rust I call a hard drive has started to become unreliable, there’s still a bit of life in it but I’d not be comfortable running home assistant on it as I rely quite heavily on Home Assistant to control all our smart stuff and link a fair few of my services together (but that’s for another post).

I do have plans to upgrade the Mac mini where I can (it’s the old 2014 model with the soldered in RAM & CPU) by upgrading the current spinning rust to a 2.5″ SSD and adding an M.2 SSD too with a little adaptor I have found on Amazon. With these upgrades, the mini should be a little faster even with only the 4GB of RAM and 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5. So long as I don’t push it too hard it should be absolutely fine until I get around to building my workstation/Server (more on that in the near future).

In the meantime, though I can’t just leave the Mac mini alone sitting on a shelf doing nothing. So I decided to set up the Ultimate Media Server and with a bit of help from Docker, Portainer and a few apps from the team at Servarr and of course Plex it really couldn’t have been easier. I’ve used Plex in the past and it is a wonderful front end for any media server, the only downside being is that to get all the features such as Live TV & Video recording, Webhooks and other things you will need a plex pass subscription, but for a basic setup like mine, it’s not really needed at the moment. What was missing before though was a way to automatically add content to Plex without me having to lift a finger.

This is where the team at Server come in. They have released a few apps that search for your TV Episodes, Movies, Music and ebooks and send them off to your torrent or Usenet client of choice to be downloaded. These apps are amazing and save you so much time and hassle it is unbelievable. The secret sauce though is another app they have called prowlarr. This beauty is kind of like a middle man that sits between the other Servarr apps and your indexers (Torrent / Usenet search engines). You tell it what indexers you want to connect to and then link it to the other apps via the built-in API magic and you only have to manage your indexers from one place rather than having to change them on each of the apps.

In order to run all these apps though we’ll need an operating system. For this, I have chosen Open Media Vault 6 with the Open Media Vault Extras & Share Root FS plugins installed. The OMV Extras plugin gives me a really simple way of installing Docker and Portainer whilst the Share Root FS system allows me to use the space on my hard drive not taken up my OMV.

For those of you that don’t know Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. It keeps each app in its own container so that it can’t interact with any others unless you tell it to. It can be a bit of a learning curve but is definitely work looking into. To make that learning curve easier though there is Portainer. Portainer is a graphical interface for Docker that runs in your browser and makes it really easy to set up containers in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways all without having to dive into coding (after the initial setup of Docker and Portainer itself that is – just follow the setup guides on their websites).

Using Portainer I installed a few apps starting with Plex which I got to search my NAS and the newly created shared folders on OMV, I then followed this up with rTorrent, then the apps from Servarr (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr & Prowlarr) and then to make life a little easier I installed Ombi. Ombi links to the Servarr app and Plex and gives you an all-in-one interface that helps you search for TV shows, Movies & Albums you might want to watch or listen to. It will then send these requests to the right Servarr app and once they have been downloaded they will turn up in your Plex library.

Another really handy app that I installed was Organizr. Organizr gives me a way to access all of these amazing apps in one place so you don’t have to remember a bunch of web addresses for things you use all the time.

Now that’s all set up though I now have what I would call the Ultimate Media Server setup. Life could not be simpler. The only thing I need to worry about now is the Hard Drive on my Mac min crashing out of the game before I get those SSDs… and finding a way to transfer everything across from the HDD to the SSDs without my usual habit of breaking things kicking in.

But that is for another time. Let me know what changes you would make to my Ultimate Media Server Setup but dropping me a comment below. I’m going to be trying to post everything Monday, Wednesday & Friday for the foreseeable future so check back then (you can even add me as a tab in Organizr).