If you've already set up Sonarr for TV shows and qBittorrent for downloads, there's one obvious gap left in your homelab: movies. That's what Radarr is for, and getting it running in Proxmox VE takes about ten minutes if you use the community install script instead of setting it up by hand.
This walkthrough assumes you're running Proxmox VE 9.x with a working network bridge, and that you already have a download client somewhere on your network — qBittorrent is the obvious choice if you followed our earlier guide, but Radarr works with several others too. By the end you'll have a movie library that automatically finds, downloads, and organizes films the moment they're released.
What You Will Learn
- What Radarr actually does and why it's different from just downloading movies manually
- How to deploy Radarr as an LXC container using the community-scripts installer
- How to connect Radarr to a download client and an indexer
- How to set up your movie root folder and quality profile correctly the first time
- How to fix the errors that trip up almost everyone during setup
What Is Radarr?
Radarr is an open-source application that manages a movie library for you. You tell it which films you want, and it watches release trackers for them, sends them to your download client when they show up, then renames and moves the finished files into a folder structure that media servers like Plex or Jellyfin can read cleanly.
It's the movie-focused sibling of Sonarr, which does the same job for TV series. If you've used Sonarr before, Radarr will feel immediately familiar — same interface style, same general workflow, just built around films instead of episodes and seasons.
On its own, Radarr doesn't download anything. It needs two other pieces to be useful: a download client (like qBittorrent or NZBGet) that actually pulls files from the internet, and an indexer, which is a searchable source Radarr queries to find out where a movie is available. We'll wire up both in this guide.
Why Would You Use It?
The honest answer: because manually searching for movies, checking file quality, downloading them, and renaming them so Plex or Jellyfin can identify the poster art gets old fast. Radarr removes basically all of that.
Add a movie once, and Radarr keeps checking for it until it's available in the quality you asked for. If a better version shows up later — say a proper Blu-ray release replaces a cam-quality copy — Radarr can grab that too and clean up the old file. It also tells you what's missing from your library at a glance, which is genuinely useful once you're tracking more than a couple dozen titles.
Running it in an LXC container on Proxmox VE rather than as a Docker container on your desktop, or god forbid a permanently-open browser tab, means it keeps running whether or not any of your other machines are on. That's really the whole point of a homelab server.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you have the following:
- A working Proxmox VE 9.x host (8.x works fine too — the install script supports both) with internet access
- At least 4 GB of free storage and 1 GB of free RAM on the node for the new container
- A download client already running and reachable on your network — this guide assumes qBittorrent, but Radarr also works with Transmission, NZBGet, SABnzbd, and a few others
- Root or sudo access to the Proxmox shell
- Basic comfort typing commands into a terminal — you won't need to write any scripts, just paste a couple of lines
You don't need an indexer account before you start. We'll cover adding one in the tutorial, and there are free, legal indexers you can use to test everything works before you sign up for anything paid.
Step-by-Step Tutorial
1. Open the Proxmox Shell
Log in to the Proxmox VE web interface, click your node in the left-hand tree (the one named after your server, not "Datacenter"), and click Shell near the top of the screen. This drops you into a root terminal on the Proxmox host itself — everything from here happens on the host, not inside an existing VM.
2. Run the Radarr install script
Paste this into the shell and press enter:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/ct/radarr.sh)"This pulls the Radarr build script from the community-scripts project (the actively maintained continuation of the old tteck scripts) and runs it. It creates a new unprivileged LXC container, installs Debian 13 inside it, then installs and configures Radarr automatically. You don't need to download an ISO or click through a container creation wizard — the script does that part for you.
3. Walk through the advanced settings (optional but worth it)
The script asks if you want Default Settings or Advanced Settings. Default is fine for testing, but if this is a container you plan to keep, choose Advanced and set:
- CPU: 2 cores is the default and plenty — Radarr itself is not CPU-hungry
- RAM: 1024 MB is the default. It's enough unless your library grows into the thousands of movies, at which point 2 GB is safer
- Disk size: 4 GB default. This only stores Radarr's app data and database, not your actual movie files, so 4-8 GB is plenty
- Container ID and hostname: pick something you'll recognize later, like
radarr
One thing worth flagging here: your movie files themselves should live on separate storage, mounted into this container or accessed over the network — not on the container's own small root disk. We'll touch on that again in Best Practices.
4. Let the script finish and note the IP address
The install takes two to four minutes on most hardware. When it's done, the script prints a summary with the container's IP address and the URL to reach Radarr, something like http://192.168.1.50:7878. Write that down — 7878 is Radarr's default port, and you'll need it in a moment.
5. Open the Radarr web UI and set up authentication
Open that IP and port in a browser. The first thing Radarr asks for is an authentication method. Don't skip this — leaving Radarr wide open on your network with no password is a common mistake, especially if your Proxmox host is ever exposed beyond your home network. Choose Forms (Login page) and set a username and password you'll actually remember.
6. Add your download client
Go to Settings → Download Clients and click the plus icon. If you're using qBittorrent, select it from the list. You'll need:
- The IP address of your qBittorrent container or VM
- The WebUI port (8080 by default in qBittorrent)
- The qBittorrent username and password you set when you configured it
Click Test before saving. If it fails, it's almost always one of two things: qBittorrent's WebUI isn't enabled, or a firewall rule between the two containers is blocking the connection. Both containers need to be able to reach each other over the network — check this if the test hangs rather than failing immediately.
7. Add a root folder for your movie library
Go to Settings → Media Management and add a root folder — this is the top-level directory where finished, organized movies land, for example /movies. If you're using a shared NFS or SMB mount for your media, make sure it's already mounted inside the container before you do this step, otherwise Radarr won't be able to write to it.
8. Add an indexer
Go to Settings → Indexers and add one. An indexer is essentially a search engine Radarr queries to find out where a specific movie is available — think of it like Radarr asking "does anyone have this?" and getting back a list of candidates to choose from. There are free public indexers you can add here just to confirm your setup works end to end before committing to anything paid.
9. Add your first movie
Click Movies in the top menu, then Add New. Search for a title, pick the correct match (Radarr shows the year and a poster to help you avoid grabbing the wrong film with a similar name), choose a quality profile, and confirm the root folder. Click Add Movie, and if you've got everything connected properly, Radarr starts searching for it within a few seconds.
Commands Explained
There's really only one command in this whole tutorial, so let's break down exactly what it's doing:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/ct/radarr.sh)"| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
curl -fsSL <url> | Downloads the script text from GitHub. -f fails silently on a server error instead of printing an HTML error page, -s suppresses the progress bar, -S shows errors if it does fail, and -L follows redirects. |
$( ... ) | Command substitution — this takes the downloaded script's text and drops it directly into the outer command as if you'd typed it yourself. |
bash -c "..." | Runs that text as a bash script in a new shell. |
It's worth knowing what this actually does before you run it, rather than just trusting any random curl-pipe-bash command you find online. In this case it's coming straight from the community-scripts GitHub repository, which is the same project maintaining hundreds of other Proxmox VE app installers, and the script itself is plain text you can read at that URL before running it if you want to check.
If you'd rather not pipe a script straight into bash, you can also install Radarr manually inside a Debian LXC container using apt and the official Radarr installer, but that's a much longer process and this guide sticks to the fast path.
Common Errors
A few things come up constantly with fresh Radarr installs:
- "Unable to connect to download client" — usually means the IP address or port for qBittorrent is wrong, or qBittorrent's WebUI authentication whitelist is blocking Radarr's container IP.
- Movies stuck on "Not monitored" or never get searched — check that your quality profile actually has a cutoff quality defined. If it's misconfigured, Radarr can sit there indefinitely waiting for a release that meets criteria it can never satisfy.
- "No results found" from every indexer — this is almost always the indexer, not Radarr. Test the indexer directly under Settings → Indexers using the Test button before assuming Radarr is broken.
- Import fails after a successful download — the finished file downloaded fine, but Radarr can't move it into your root folder. This is nearly always a permissions or missing-mount issue, covered below.
Troubleshooting
If imports keep failing after a download completes, check the container's mount points first. Run pct config <VMID> from the Proxmox shell (replacing VMID with your Radarr container's ID) and confirm your movie storage is actually listed as a mount point, not just referenced somewhere in Radarr's settings. A folder path that exists on paper but isn't really mounted inside the container will fail silently in the Radarr logs.
If the download client test keeps failing even though qBittorrent is clearly running, log into the qBittorrent container itself and check Tools → Options → Web UI. There's a setting for "Bypass authentication for clients on localhost" and a separate IP whitelist — if Radarr's container IP isn't allowed and isn't localhost to qBittorrent, the connection gets rejected even with the right password.
For anything else, Radarr keeps detailed logs under System → Logs in the web UI, and they're usually specific enough to point you straight at the problem — unlike a lot of software, Radarr's error messages tend to actually say what went wrong instead of just failing quietly.
Best Practices
Keep your actual movie files off the container's root disk. Mount an NFS share, a bind-mounted directory from the Proxmox host, or another network storage location into the container instead, and point your root folder there. The container's own disk should really only ever hold Radarr's database and configuration — a few hundred megabytes at most.
Set a sensible quality profile before you start adding dozens of movies. It's much easier to get this right upfront than to go back and fix mismatched quality on fifty movies later.
Turn on notifications under Settings → Connect if you want to know when something fails rather than checking the UI every few days. Radarr can ping Discord, a Gotify server, email, and several others.
Back up the container regularly using Proxmox's built-in vzdump backups. Radarr's whole configuration — your indexers, quality profiles, and library — lives in a SQLite database inside the container, and losing it means rebuilding all of that from scratch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Sonarr installed before I install Radarr?
No. They're independent applications that happen to share a similar interface and workflow. You can run Radarr on its own for movies without ever touching Sonarr.
Can Radarr and Sonarr share the same download client?
Yes, and most people set it up exactly this way. Add the same qBittorrent instance as a download client in both apps — they'll queue and manage their own downloads separately without conflicting.
Does Radarr download movies illegally?
Radarr itself doesn't download anything — it's an automation layer that searches indexers and hands results to your download client. What you connect it to and what you download is entirely up to you and your local laws.
How much storage does the Radarr container itself need?
The default 4 GB is plenty for the app and its database. Your actual movies should live on separate storage, not inside this container.
Can I move Radarr to a different container later if I need more resources?
Yes. Since your movie files live outside the container, you can spin up a new one, point it at the same root folder, and restore your Radarr backup or reconfigure it fresh without losing any actual media.
Conclusion
Once Radarr, qBittorrent, and an indexer are all talking to each other, adding a movie to your library is a two-click process — search, confirm, done. The setup takes longer to read about than to actually do.
If you've already got Sonarr running for TV, this same pattern of "community script installs the app, you wire up a download client and an indexer" is one you'll see again if you decide to add Prowlarr, Bazarr, or a request tool like Overseerr down the line. Each one follows roughly the same shape once you've done it the first time.