Setting up a home media system with Jellyfin,transmission,Jackett , Lidarr, Sonarr and Radarr.

So recently I got tired of paying for so many services like spotify , Netflix , AppleTV  and so on, With recent cash crunch at Tech industry and after getting inspired from Dhh blog post on why basecamp is leaving the cloud. https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 . I decided to put a stop to paying for these services as well and sharpen up my linux skills by setting up a home media server that is self hosted. 

I had asked for a NUC from my team member Avash, We had used these Intel NUC's extensively for our IOT based digital signage projects for MILB since 2018, These machines were very reliable compared to raspberry pi's , Raspberry pi's were very hard to get my hands into as well. Just had a raspberry 2 laying around but I wanted do so many stuffs so decided on a bit more powerful machine. 

Here is the screenshot of the Intel Nuc speciications and the actual hardware. 

Since, it had been a while since i had actually done some work myself on setting up systems I had to go back to reddit to find out on systems that I could self host. Decided on Sonarr, Lidarr, Radar and Jacket stack. 

First things first, I had to set up a linux image so plain old way , decided on ubuntu ( Could have explored with popOS but later )

Step 1 : downloaded ubuntu . 

Step 2 : Created a bootable USB using BalenaEtcher https://www.balena.io/etcher 

Step 3: Flashed the Intel Nuc with this and installed ubuntu on the system. 

Step 4: Regular update and upgrade after fresh install.

Now being a pre-docker guy I wanted to do it manually without any docker compose files so that I could understand the stack and this blog helped me a lot. 

Installed Jackett using blog post here. https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

Added a few indexers  

I needed my NUC to have a static IP so assigned one. so that I could visit these tools from web interfaces as well. Also added in ssh-server so that I could use my ipad or main macbook to access and configure other stuffs. 

Added following indexers. 

I wanted to use the two external storages that I had left around house 1TB each to store the media files that I would be using. So I plugged one to NUC . realized I wanna mount these up at boot time so created fstab 

I also need to configure the download client for downloading these torrents. Hence installed transmission as daemon. Instructions could be found here. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/TransmissionHowTo

Make sure to install as daemon.

Moving towards Installing radarr to watch movies. Installation guide could be found here . https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/installation#linux

We'll need to configure indexers , download client and media root folder in radarr settings as shown below. 

after this set up was done. Next up was installing sonarr. Installation guide could be found here and the configuration was done similar to radarr.  https://sonarr.tv/#downloads-v3-linux-ubuntu

Lidarr didn't had any problem as well following the instruction guide here. https://wiki.servarr.com/lidarr/installation#linux

Now that I had systems for finding and downloading the media from internet. I  needed a home streaming system. 

Decided on Jellyfin for the job. 

Installation instruction can be found here.  https://jellyfin.org/downloads/server
Configurations were simple enough. Just adding in libraries and pointing them to my media storage folders did the job. 

Now I could load movies, shows and musics from all of my devices by installing clients on the devices or by directly accessing these in the web browser.  Which included my devices, wife's devices and my kids . Including a living Room television set. 

So far I have a happy system. I might switch out music to using some another system to have offline playing ability in my devices and phone as well. That is for some other day though.