Guide to setup your own ubuntu server using docker compose to containerise many different applications with seamless maintenance achieving something like below.
- Get a USB stick, install the latest LTS version of Ubuntu Server and then download balanaEtcher. Run balanaEtcher with what you just downloaded and turn your usb stick into a bootable drive.
- Plug the USB stick into your server, turn on the server and follow the steps to setting up your server via the console. If you're failing to find drivers then shutdown the installation and re-run the computer to get into the BIOS settings. One common reason for a missing drive is RAID enabled so disable that if so.
- You have now finished your installation of Ubuntu Server and you should be ready to start creating Docker containers and orchestrating them via docker compose.
- Install docker https://docs.docker.com/install/#supported-platforms, docker-compose https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/#install-compose,
Getting your directory setup correct from the beginning is super important to save time and to have an efficient media-server when it comes to your containers moving files.
All of your container's docker configuration files will live here. Please note that the config will be stored on your SSD if you follow below. You can change this to whatever you'd like.
/docker/appdata
For example, portainer's config will live here /docker/appdata/portainer
The base directory serves a purpose of allowing hard links between media and downloads.
/mnt/media/media-server/data
Sonarr and Radarr will download the torrents here and use hard links to copy the files over to the media directory
/mnt/media/media-server/data/downloads
This is where all of your media (tv and movies) will be stored.
/mnt/media/media-server/data/media
Inside media you then have
/mnt/media/media-server/data/media/tv
/mnt/media/media-server/data/media/movies
Don't get confused by the complete and incomplete directories. These are added by Radarr and Sonarr.
You are free to change your directory setup but beware you will need to update the docker-compose.yml and .env to follow your changes.
This guide does not include any information about partitioning. You will need to figure this out on your own if you go down this path.
Run the following comand to find out information about your drives before mounting them lsblk or sudo lsblk. Identity your drive's location and type, for example my drive was located at /dev/sda2 and the type is exfat. You will need these details if you have to replace anything in the below command to mount your drive.
This command simply mounts your drive to a given directory. The parameters uid and gid are providing the user and group with permissions to read/write on the mount. This is crucial for Radarr, Sonarr, bazarr and prowlarr to work!
sudo mount -t exfat -o defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 /dev/sda2 /mnt/media/media-server
Using the above sections on the desired directory structure go and create it. The command to create directories is mkdir {directory} or sudo mkdir {directory}. For example, I could whilst inside /mnt/media/media-server I could run the following command sudo mkdir data/downloads
Whilst inside the root of the docker directory /docker run the following commands one by one: touch .env, sudo chown root:root .env, sudo chmod 600 .env. This command creates a .env file at the root. To edit the .env file run the following command sudo nano ~/docker/.env and input the environment variables provided in the example file with whatever changes you want to make.
Important: Make sure you update the .env file with your values! Especially the SERVER_LAN_IP variable if you're using PiHole.
At this point, you should be ready to run docker-compose with the following command whilst inside the root of the docker directory docker compose up -d or sudo docker compose up -d.
In this guide, I will not be providing any additional help with setting up all of the different containers in the web UI. There are many guides and the applications even have their own documentation on their websites. I have provided links below that will be useful for this stage.
- Some containers especially the arrs will have cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1) provided in config so they don't use the PiHole container for DNS resolve. Without this, these containers will not work properly and will fail to the find indexers etc. Obviously, if you're not using PiHole then you can remove the dns config from your containers.
- If you're unfortunate enough to have Virgin Media as your ISP then you will need to setup a VPN in front of your prowlarr container so prowlarr can communciate with the indexers. To do this, choose the best VPN service for you and setup a Gluetun container 'https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun' inside your docker-compose.yml. The Gluetun wiki provides setup instructions for most VPN providers 'https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki'
ToDo
- https://github.com/ghostserverd/mediaserver-docker/tree/master#installation
- https://trash-guides.info
- https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/quick-start-guide
- https://wiki.servarr.com/sonarr/quick-start-guide
- https://wiki.servarr.com/prowlarr/quick-start-guide
- https://github.com/awesome-jellyfin/awesome-jellyfin
- https://www.phind.com/search?home=true