Somewhere between ripping CDs and paying for three different streaming subscriptions, a lot of people end up with a folder full of music that's a mess. Duplicate albums with slightly different tags, tracks with no album art, artist names spelled two different ways depending on which site you downloaded from. Fixing that by hand, one file at a time, is not a fun weekend.
Lidarr is built to stop that mess from happening in the first place. It watches for new releases from artists you tell it to follow, grabs them through a download client you already have running, and renames and tags everything consistently on the way in. If you've already set up Sonarr for TV or Radarr for movies, Lidarr will feel immediately familiar — it's built by the same project, on the same idea, just pointed at music instead.
This guide walks through installing Lidarr in its own LXC container on Proxmox VE, using the community-scripts installer that powers the other arr-family guides on this site. By the end you'll have Lidarr running, a music root folder configured, a download client connected, and your first artist being tracked automatically.
What You Will Learn
- What Lidarr does and how it fits alongside Sonarr and Radarr
- How to install Lidarr in an LXC container on Proxmox VE with the community-scripts installer
- How to set up a root folder, quality profile, and download client connection
- How to add your first artist and confirm Lidarr is actually grabbing releases
- What the most common setup errors mean and how to get past them
What Is Lidarr?
Lidarr is a music collection manager. You tell it which artists you care about, and it keeps an eye on new album and single releases, then automatically sends them to a download client — usually qBittorrent or a Usenet client — once it finds a good match. After the download finishes, Lidarr moves the files into your music library, renames them using a naming pattern you control, and tags them with accurate metadata.
That metadata comes from MusicBrainz, a free, community-maintained database of artists, albums, and tracks. It's the same kind of source your phone or a media player might use to figure out what song is currently playing. Lidarr leans on it heavily — every artist you add gets matched against a MusicBrainz entry, which is how it knows an album's correct title, track order, and release date instead of guessing from a filename.
If you've used Sonarr or Radarr, the layout of Lidarr will look almost identical. Artists take the place of TV shows, albums take the place of seasons, and the workflow of adding something, letting it search, and watching it land in your library is the same. It's a deliberate design choice by the developers — once you know one arr app, the rest are barely a learning curve.
Why Would You Use It?
The honest answer is that Lidarr saves you from a repetitive chore. Checking for new releases from a dozen artists by hand, downloading each one, then fixing tags and file names afterward, adds up to real time every week. Lidarr does all three steps without you thinking about it, as long as the artist is in its list.
There's a quality-control angle too. Because everything gets matched against MusicBrainz, you end up with a library where album art, track numbers, and artist names are actually consistent — something that's nearly impossible to maintain manually once you're past a few hundred albums.
If your library is small and static — the same fifty albums you've had for years — Lidarr is probably more than you need. It earns its place once you're actively growing a collection and want new releases to show up without you remembering to go looking for them.
Prerequisites
- A Proxmox VE host running 8.x or 9.x, with the node able to reach the internet
- Root access to the Proxmox web UI or shell
- At least 4 GB of free storage for the container, plus however much space your music library needs on top of that
- A download client already running and reachable on your network — qBittorrent is the most common choice, and this guide assumes it's already set up
- Some existing storage location for your music files, whether that's local disk, an NFS share, or a mounted network drive
- Comfort pasting one command into the Proxmox web shell
Step-by-Step Tutorial
1. Open the Proxmox Shell
Log into the Proxmox web UI, select your node in the left-hand tree, and open Shell from the toolbar at the top. You're in a root shell on the Proxmox host itself — the container doesn't exist yet, this is just where the installer runs from.
2. Run the Lidarr install script
Paste this into the shell and press Enter:
bash -c \"$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/ct/lidarr.sh)\"This pulls an installer from the community-scripts project — the same third-party script collection behind the Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr guides on this site. It's not an official Proxmox tool and it isn't maintained by the Lidarr developers either, but it's a widely used, actively maintained script that builds the container and installs Lidarr in one pass instead of you doing each step by hand.
3. Accept the defaults, or go advanced
The script asks whether you want the default install or the advanced one. Default builds an unprivileged Debian 13 container with 2 CPU cores, 1 GB of RAM, and a 4 GB disk. That's genuinely enough for Lidarr — it's a lightweight app, and the heavy lifting (actually downloading files) happens on your download client, not here.
Pick Advanced only if you want to set the hostname, disk size, or network bridge yourself before the container is created. For most homelabs, the default is the right call.
4. Wait for the install and grab the IP address
This takes two to three minutes on typical hardware. When it's done, the script prints the container's IP and the Lidarr URL, something like http://192.168.1.60:8686. Port 8686 is Lidarr's default, separate from Sonarr's 8989, Radarr's 7878, and Prowlarr's 9696, so they can all run side by side without conflicts.
5. Open Lidarr and set up authentication
Visit the URL from the last step. On first launch, Lidarr asks you to create a username and password. Set real credentials here — skipping this leaves the UI open to anyone on your network, and Lidarr will eventually hold API keys for your download client and indexers.
6. Add a root folder
Go to Settings → Media Management → Root Folders and add the path where your music should live, such as /music. If that path doesn't exist inside the container yet, create it first with mkdir -p /music from a shell inside the container, or mount external storage there before pointing Lidarr at it. Every artist you add later needs a root folder to be saved into — without one, Lidarr has nowhere to put anything it downloads.
7. Set up a quality profile
Under Settings → Profiles, review the default quality profile or create your own. This controls what Lidarr considers an acceptable download — MP3 320, FLAC, or a specific bitrate range. Decide this before you start adding artists. Changing it later is fine, but Lidarr won't retroactively re-grab albums it already has just because you raised the bar.
8. Connect your download client
Go to Settings → Download Clients → the plus icon, and choose qBittorrent (or whatever client you're running). You'll need its IP address, port, and login credentials. Click Test before saving — a failed test almost always means a typo in the host, port, or password.
9. Add your first artist
Click Artists → the plus icon, and search by name. Lidarr queries MusicBrainz and shows matching results — pick the correct one, especially if the artist name is common, since MusicBrainz sometimes lists several entries for similarly named acts. Choose your root folder and quality profile on the add screen, then click Add.
10. Trigger a search and confirm it works
Open the artist's page and click Search Monitored. If Lidarr has an indexer configured — either added directly under Settings → Indexers, or pushed in automatically from a connected Prowlarr instance — it should start finding releases within a few seconds. Watch the Activity → Queue tab; a download showing up there and moving to your download client confirms the whole chain is working.
Commands Explained
There's one command doing the real work in this guide, so it's worth knowing exactly what it does instead of just pasting and trusting it.
bash -c \"$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/ct/lidarr.sh)\"curl -fsSL fetches the script from GitHub. -f makes curl fail quietly on server errors instead of dumping an HTML error page into your shell, -s suppresses the progress bar, -S still shows an error message if the request fails, and -L follows any redirects. The fetched text is substituted directly into bash -c \"...\", which runs it immediately — nothing is saved to disk first. That's normal for these installers, but it does mean you're trusting the source. Stick to the official community-scripts/ProxmoxVE repository rather than a link from a random forum post.
Inside the container, mkdir -p /music creates the root folder path (and any missing parent directories) if it doesn't already exist — the -p flag is what stops it from erroring out if part of the path is already there.
Common Errors
| Error | What It Means | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| "No root folder specified" when adding an artist | You skipped Step 6, or the root folder you added doesn't exist inside the container | Go to Settings → Media Management → Root Folders and add a valid path; create the directory first with mkdir -p if needed |
| Download client test fails | Lidarr can't reach the client's IP or port, or the login is wrong | Confirm the client is running and on the same network, then re-check the host, port, username, and password — a trailing space in the password is a common culprit |
| Artist search returns no results, or the wrong artist entirely | MusicBrainz has multiple entries for similarly named artists, or the name has unusual characters | Search using the artist's MusicBrainz ID instead of their name if you know it, or try adding a country or genre keyword to narrow the results |
| Album stuck showing as "missing" with no download activity | No indexer is returning results for that release, or none are configured at all | Check Settings → Indexers for at least one working entry, and confirm a manual search from the album page returns anything |
Troubleshooting
If the Lidarr web UI won't load, start from the Proxmox shell. Enter the container with pct enter <VMID>, then check the service with systemctl status lidarr. A stopped service usually comes back cleanly with systemctl restart lidarr, and the logs under /var/log/lidarr inside the container will generally tell you why it stopped.
If album matches look wrong — wrong release year, missing tracks, the wrong cover art — that's almost always a MusicBrainz data issue rather than a Lidarr bug. You can manually search and pick a different release under the album's Search tab, or edit the entry directly on MusicBrainz's site if you're confident the data itself is incorrect there.
Downloads that finish in your download client but never show up in your music library usually mean the download client's completed-download path and Lidarr's expected path don't match. Check Settings → Download Clients for a remote path mapping option, especially if the download client and Lidarr are in separate containers with different mount points for the same physical storage.
Best Practices
Set a static IP or DHCP reservation for the Lidarr container early, especially once it's connected to a download client and possibly Prowlarr. A changed IP breaks every one of those connections at once.
Decide your folder and naming structure before you add fifty artists, not after. Changing the naming format later means either living with inconsistent old files or re-running an import on your entire library, which takes a while.
Back up the Lidarr container the same way you'd back up any other LXC container on this host — a scheduled vzdump job covers its database and settings, which matters more than it sounds once you've spent time tuning quality profiles and metadata.
If you're running Prowlarr already, connect it to Lidarr instead of adding indexers separately here. One less place to manage indexer credentials is one less place they can drift out of sync.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Lidarr work with Usenet as well as torrents?
Yes. It supports both, the same way Sonarr and Radarr do. You'll need a Usenet-capable download client like SABnzbd or NZBGet connected instead of, or alongside, a torrent client.
Can Lidarr find music that MusicBrainz doesn't know about?
Not reliably. Lidarr's whole matching system depends on MusicBrainz data, so very obscure or unofficial releases that were never catalogued there are unlikely to match correctly, if at all.
Do I need Prowlarr to use Lidarr?
No, you can add indexers directly in Lidarr under Settings → Indexers. Prowlarr just centralizes that step if you're also running Sonarr or Radarr and don't want to configure the same indexer three times.
Will Lidarr re-download an album I already have if the quality is lower than my profile?
Only if you enable upgrade searches for that quality profile. By default, Lidarr treats an existing file that meets the minimum cutoff as done and won't go looking for a better version on its own.
Can I run Lidarr in the same container as Sonarr or Radarr?
Technically yes, but it's not how the community-scripts installers are designed to work, and it makes backups, updates, and troubleshooting messier. Giving each app its own lightweight container is the simpler path, and the resource cost is small.
Is it safe to expose Lidarr directly to the internet?
Don't. Keep it on your local network, and if you need remote access, put it behind a reverse proxy with authentication or reach it through something like Tailscale instead of forwarding its port directly.
Conclusion
Lidarr won't do anything for you until you tell it which artists to follow, but once that list starts growing, the difference is noticeable fast — new releases just appear in your library, correctly named and tagged, without you having to go looking for them. The setup here takes maybe fifteen minutes once your download client is already running.
If you've already got Sonarr or Radarr going on this host, adding Lidarr costs you one more lightweight LXC container and barely any extra effort, since the whole workflow is one you already know. Point it at a root folder, connect a download client, add an artist, and let it take the rest from there.