https://github.com/egg82/fetcharr
Disclaimer: I am the developer
Long story short, after Huntarr exploded I still wanted an app that did the core of Huntarr’s job: find and fetch missing or upgradable media. I looked around for some solutions but didn’t like them for various reasons. So, I made my own.
No web UI, configured via environment variables in a similar manner to Unpackerr. It does one job and it does it (a little too) well. Even when trying a few different solutions for a few days each, Fetcharr caught a bunch of stuff they all missed almost immediately. This is likely due to the way it weights media for search.
Since you made it this far, a few notes:
- I did still use ChatGPT on a couple of occasions. They’re documented and entirely web UI - no agents. Anything it gave me was vetted and noted in the code before publishing.
- The current icon is temporary and LLM-generated. I’ve put out some feelers to pay an artist to create an icon. Waiting to hear back.
- It’s written in Java because that’s the language I’m most familiar with. SSL certs in Java containers can be painful but I added some code to make it as easy as Python requests or Node
- While it still has a skip-if-tagged-with-X feature, it doesn’t create or apply any tags. I didn’t find that portion necessary, despite other popular *arrs using it. Not sure why they do, even after developing this.
- Caution is advised when first using it on a large media collection. It’ll very likely pick up quite a number of things initially if you weren’t on top of things beforehand. Just make sure your pipeline is set up well, or you limit the number of searches or lengthen the amount of time between searches using the environment variables.
That’s an interesting point. In my years of running them all I’ve always needed a third-party something to upgrade or find missing media. I don’t exactly know why the built-in systems don’t work, but they genuinely do not seem to. I’ll occasionally see a scan go off but, for some reason, nothing ever gets picked up.
So, yeah; long story short, the built-ins don’t work and I don’t know why and this was still easier than trying to figure it out.
Edit: if you’re curious, give Fetcharr a try and let me know if it does anything for you. It’s free and takes a couple minutes. It should be pretty immediate, if your experience ends up being anything like mine.
Not to dimish your work at all, but: the Sonarr upgrades absolutely do work.
They do, but only by passively monitoring RSS feeds for new content that exceeds your current quality. They don’t do active upgrade searches unless you manually trigger them.
The distinction is important if you imported some or all of your media library, rather than building it from scratch with the arr stack stuff. It also matters if you source some your content via providers that don’t have RSS feeds.
I think you may have nailed what’s happening to my stack. I remember looking into it a couple years ago and RSS was stuck in my head but I wasn’t sure why. This tracks, and explains why active fetching works significantly better for me.
honestly if they work for you then awesome! Maybe mine is misconfigured somehow or maybe I just have bad luck, but Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, etc have never caught everything. Once I started playing with this I realized just how much I was missing.
Either way, if your current system works for you then I don’t usually recommend changing it. Give it a try if you want- the worst it can do it accidentally find something that could be upgraded or missing. Or if you’d rather leave your stack alone that’s perfectly fine as well.
Sonarr and Radarr heavily rely on quality profiles you need to define, for examples see TrashGuides.
Your system probably needs less setup in comparison
ah, yeah, that would make sense as to why these types of systems are so popular. Since I’m a devops type by trade, my arr stack lives in a couple of kubernetes clusters. I use a Configarr cronjob with a fairly customized configmap to sync the trash guides with some minor preference edits. Maybe my issue is that it’s too defined, but I think if that were the case I wouldn’t be getting any benefit out of Fetcharr. Honestly even if it weren’t the case you’d think I’d at least be picking up movies that are completely missing. I’m not sure what to blame, here, but if other people are verifying that the builtin systems work for them (as well as something like Fatcharr does) then I assume it’s a skill issue or bad luck on my part.
Just to add, I didnt mean to put down this software at all – I’m always a fan of more self hosting. I just remember reading people using Huntarr alongside a full *arr stack and was curious how it fits.
absolutely! As with everything, try it out and see if it fits. Personally, I prefer apps that do their job well, and as few of them running as possible. If you don’t think it’ll be useful or try it out and find that it’s not, then that’s for the best. It means you’re good to go without any extra hangers-on. I tried the app as I was developing it and not only found it useful to myself, but it worked so well for me that I thought it might be useful to other people as well.