Sonarr: TV Automation That Makes Usenet Shine

Grabbing a season pack by hand is fine once. Keeping a dozen running shows current — new episodes, proper releases replacing pre-airs, quality upgrades when a better encode shows up — is not a manual job. Sonarr exists to make that entire category of work disappear: you add a series once, and from then on episodes arrive, get renamed, and land in your library without you touching anything.

What Sonarr actually automates

Sonarr is an open source PVR for Usenet (and BitTorrent). You add a series, pick a quality profile, and Sonarr takes over the full lifecycle:

• Monitoring — it tracks air dates via metadata providers and starts searching the moment an episode is available, including backfilling entire back catalogs for newly added shows
• Searching — queries go out to your newznab indexers; releases are scored against your quality and language settings before anything is grabbed
• Download handoff — the chosen NZB goes straight to SABnzbd or NZBGet
• Import and renaming — completed downloads are moved into your library with consistent, configurable naming that Plex, Jellyfin and Emby parse cleanly
• Upgrades — if a WEB-DL appears for an episode you only have in HDTV quality, Sonarr replaces it automatically, up to the cutoff you defined

Since v4, quality decisions run through Custom Formats — scored rules that let you prefer specific release groups, codecs, or HDR variants and ban others. Combined with shared scoring profiles from the TRaSH guides, this is far more precise than the old Preferred Words system ever was.

Why the Usenet combination is so strong

Sonarr works with torrents too, but the Usenet pairing is where it gets genuinely hands-off, for one main reason: failed download handling. When a download comes in incomplete — missing articles, failed repair — SABnzbd reports the failure back, and Sonarr immediately and automatically grabs the next-best release from another indexer. With a couple of solid indexers behind it, a broken download costs you nothing but a few minutes of delay you’ll never notice.

The rest of the Usenet profile fits automation just as well: downloads saturate your line instead of depending on seeders, there are no ratio obligations on content you only needed once, and an episode posted overnight is in your library before you wake up. Retention deep enough to backfill a ten-year-old series doesn’t hurt either.

On a NAS or self-hosted server with Docker

Sonarr’s job is to react to things that happen while you’re not at your computer. That’s why the natural home for it is a machine that’s always on — a NAS, a home server, a small box in the closet. Docker is the path of least resistance: the linuxserver.io image is well maintained, updates are a docker compose pull away, and the whole configuration lives in one bind-mounted folder.

services:
  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/Berlin
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - /srv/media:/data
    ports:
      - "8989:8989"
    restart: unless-stopped

One detail worth getting right from the start: mount your downloads and your library under a single volume (here /data, containing e.g. /data/usenet and /data/tv). That way imports are instant hardlinks or atomic moves instead of slow copies across mount points — the single most common stumbling block in *arr Docker setups.

On Synology and QNAP the same compose file works via Container Manager; SynoCommunity also packages Sonarr natively if you’d rather avoid Docker on older models.

Local installation works too

Nothing forces you onto a server. Sonarr ships native installers for Windows (runs as a tray app or service), macOS, and Linux. Since v4 it runs on modern .NET with no Mono dependency, so a local install is a two-minute affair. It’s a perfectly good way to evaluate the tool or to run a small setup on a desktop that’s on most of the day anyway.

The honest caveat: Sonarr only automates while it’s running. A PC that sleeps at night will catch up when it wakes — Sonarr searches for anything it missed — but the always-on box is what makes the experience truly zero-touch. Many people start local and migrate to a NAS later; the move is painless since the entire state lives in one config folder you can copy across.

Where it sits in the stack

Sonarr is the decision-maker, not the downloader and not the indexer. It needs newznab endpoints on one side — either indexers added directly, or aggregated behind NZBHydra2 or Prowlarr so you manage API keys in one place — and SABnzbd or NZBGet on the other. Radarr (movies) and Lidarr (music) follow the same pattern, which is why the whole family is usually deployed together as one compose stack.

If TV is the reason you keep your Usenet subscriptions around, Sonarr is the tool that justifies them: it turns indexers, provider and downloader into a system that simply keeps your library current on its own.

Project website: sonarr.tv