Sonarr — Automated TV Show Management in Docker

Sonarr does for TV shows exactly what Radarr does for movies. Add a series, set a quality profile, and Sonarr monitors air dates, searches your indexers when a new episode drops, grabs it, imports it into your library, and pings Plex or Jellyfin to scan. You never have to manually search for an episode again.

What you need before you start

• Prowlarr running with at least one indexer configured
• A download client — qBittorrent (via Gluetun) or SABnzbd
• A TV dataset on your pool — e.g. /mnt/tank/media/tv
• The same /downloads path mounted in both Sonarr and your download client

Docker Compose

Create /mnt/tank/stacks/sonarr/docker-compose.yml:

services:
  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=568
      - PGID=568
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - /mnt/tank/configs/sonarr:/config
      - /mnt/tank/media/tv:/tv
      - /mnt/tank/downloads:/downloads
    ports:
      - 8989:8989
    restart: unless-stopped

cd /mnt/tank/stacks/sonarr
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f sonarr

Sonarr will be available at http://<your-nas-ip>:8989.

First-time setup

1 — Media management

Go to Settings → Media Management and add /tv as a root folder. Enable Rename Episodes and Use Hardlinks.

A good episode naming format to use:

{Series Title}/Season {season:00}/{Series Title} - S{season:00}E{episode:00} - {Episode Title}

Daily Episode Format:

{Series TitleYear} - {Air-Date} - {Episode CleanTitle} {[Custom Formats]}{[Quality Full]}{[MediaInfo VideoDynamicRangeType]}{[Mediainfo AudioCodec]}{[Mediainfo AudioChannels]}{[MediaInfo VideoCodec]}{-Release Group}

Season Folder Format:

Season {season:00}

2 — Add your download client

Settings → Download Clients → +. Same settings as Radarr — host, port, credentials — but set the category to sonarr so downloads don’t mix.

3 — Connect Prowlarr

In Prowlarr go to Settings → Apps → + and add Sonarr. All your indexers will sync across automatically.

4 — Quality profiles

Go to Settings → Profiles and create or edit a quality profile for your TV downloads — set which resolutions/sources are allowed and in what order of preference, so Sonarr always grabs the best available release without upgrading endlessly.

5 — Add a series

Series → Add New, search for the show, choose your quality profile and whether you want all seasons or just future episodes, then click Add Series.

Monitor options: “All Episodes” grabs everything from every season. “Future Episodes” only grabs new episodes going forward. “Missing Episodes” fills in gaps you’re missing without re-downloading things you already have.

How season packs work

When a full season pack is released, Sonarr is smart enough to grab the pack rather than individual episodes — it compares what you have against what’s in the pack and upgrades accordingly. It will also upgrade individual episode files if a better quality release appears later, depending on your quality profile settings.

Useful commands

# View recent activity
docker compose logs --tail 50 sonarr

# Check what Sonarr is importing right now
docker exec sonarr cat /config/logs/sonarr.txt | grep -i import | tail -20

# Restart
docker compose restart sonarr

Common problems