It’s not a flowchart but I would recommend the following site: trash-guides.info

Lots of useful info and guides

For the purposes of this explanation sonarr and radarr are the same, but keep in mind that sonarr only does tv shows and radarr only does movies

You tell sonarr what you want to watch --> sonarr tells prowlarr what you want to watch --> prowlarr will search websites for magnet links to your show (you have to specify which websites) --> prowlarr will give the download manager (qbittorrent, etc) the magnet link and it will download it --> sonarr will take the downloaded file and copy it somewhere else for organizational purposes --> media server (jellyfin) will see the copied file and download associated metadata (thumbnail, episode name, episode number, etc) and allow you to watch it

The only programs you need for a purely functional arr stack are sonarr/radarr, prowlarr, qbittorrent, and jellyfin, or any other media server. Anything else is purely icing on the cake

If you want movies you use Radarr, and if you want TV Shows you use Sonarr. And if you want either of those to use torrent sites to find things rather than Usenet, you setup Prowlarr to convert from those random sites into the format Radarr and Sonarr support.

There are others, but that’s a place to start.

Here’s a very old flow chart I made for some folks that didn’t want to use Linux. Though it mostly applies to any serup

It’s honestly not that complicated.

You first need an indexer. This is the software that Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr uses to search for torrents. Prowlarr is an indexer and is where you connect to a tracker.

Then you obviously need a download client. Something like qBittorrent. Then on Radarr, Sonarr and Lidarr you add qBittorrent as the download client.

When you search for a movie on Radarr, it will send the request to Prowlarr, which looks at your tracker and then send the results back to Radarr. When you click the movie you want, then Radarr sends the torrent to the download client aka qBittorrent.

Simple, yes. I probably forgot something though. Plex or Jellyfin to actually watch the content.

Prowlarr > Sonarr > qBittorrent > Jellyfin

If you want to setup a stack take a look up TRaSH guides. Then it goes roughly like this.

You have software that search and make the download requests: radarr (movies), sonarr (TV shows), lidarr (music), bazaar (subtitles, if you need to add more that don’t already come with the movie/show). But there might be others e.g. for porn or like here for YouTube.

Those forward the request to a downloader like Sabnzb if you are using usenet or qbirtorrent for torrents.

Those above are the main ones and from there you can add things that make your life easier:

• Prowlarr: sonarr/radar need an indexer to search, instead of configuring them in each software this allows you to do it once and then sync across the other apps

• Overseerr/Jellyseerr: if you want a nicer frontend to search and make download requests instead of doing so in radar/sonarr.

• Recycler/Notifier/Configarr (all do roughly the same): sonarr/radarr allow you to configure specific profiles to score the quality of downloads so you can get them in the format you desire (e.g. so you want 1080p or 4k, HDR yes or no). These allow you to sync custom formats with sonarr/radarr that others like trash-guides have developed.

• Tdarr: if you would like to reencode and compress movies to save space this allows you to do so in an automated way. Although you usually I’d imagine it might be easier to just setup a better profile in sonarr/radarr and download the desired version (should you e.g. want x265 encoded versions)