Radarr Quick Start Guide (2025)

• Table of Contents
• Quick Start Setup Guide
• Startup
• Media Management
  • Movie Naming
  • Importing
  • File Management
  • Root Folders
• Profiles
• Quality
• Indexers
• Download Clients
  • {.tabset}
    • Usenet
    • BitTorrent
• How to import your existing organized media library
  • Import movies
  • Importing Existing Media
    • No match found
    • Fix faulty folder name after import
  • How to add a movie

This page is still in progress and not complete. Contributions are welcome

For a more detailed breakdown of all the settings, check Radarr =>Settings

In this guide we will try to explain the basic setup you need to do to get started with Radarr. We're going to skip some options that you may see on the screen. If you want to dive deeper into those, please see the appropriate page in the FAQ and docs for a full explanation.

Please note that within the screenshots and GUI settings in orange are advanced options, so you will need to click Show Advanced at the top of the page to make them visible.

After installation and starting up, you open a browser and go to http://{your_ip_here}:7878

First we’re going to take a look at the Media Management settings where we can setup our preferred naming and file management settings.

Settings => Media Management

¶ Movie Naming

1. Enable/Disable Renaming of your movies (as opposed to leaving the names that are currently there or as they were when you downloaded them).
2. If you want illegal characters replaced or removed (\ / : * ? " < > | ~ # % & + { }).
3. This setting will dictate how Radarr handles colons within the movie file.
4. Here you will select the naming convention for the actual movie files.
5. (Advanced Option) This is where you will set the naming convention for the folder that contains the video file.

If you want a recommended naming scheme and examples take a look TRaSH's Recommended Naming Schemes.

¶ Importing

1. (Advanced Option) Enable Use Hardlinks instead of Copy more info how and why with examples TRaSH's Hardlinks Guide.
2. (Advanced Option) Import matching extra files (subtitles, nfo, etc) after importing a file.

¶ File Management

1. Movies deleted from disk are automatically unmonitored in Radarr.
   • You may want to delete a movie but do not want Radarr to re-download the movie. You would use this option.
2. (Advanced Option) Designate a location for deleted files to go to (just in case you want to retrieve them before the bin is taken out).
3. (Advanced Option) This is how old a given file can be before it is deleted permanently.

¶ Root Folders

Here we will add the root folder that Radarr will be using to import your existing organized media library and where Radarr will be importing (copy/hardlink/move) your media after your download client has downloaded it.

* Non-Windows: If you're using an NFS mount ensure nolock is enabled.
* If you're using an SMB mount ensure nobrl is enabled.

The user and group you configured Radarr to run as must have read & write access to this location.

Your download client downloads to a download folder and Radarr imports it to your media folder (final destination) that your media server uses.

Your download folder and media (library / root) folder can’t be the same location

Don’t forget to save your changes

Settings => Profiles

Here you’ll be allowed to configure profiles for which you can have for the quality, preferred language, and custom format scoring of a movie you’re looking to download.

We recommend you to create your own profiles and only select the Quality Sources and Languages you actually want.

For more information on foreign titles and languages see this FAQ entry

Many users find TRaSH's Custom Format Language Guide helpful to specify the languages of movies they want.

Profiles is also where Custom Format Scores are configured. It's strongly recommended to add the below Custom Formats from TRaSH's Guides to avoid unwanted downloads. Refer to the linked TRaSH Guide Custom Format article and additional referenced 3 TRaSH Custom Format Guides on the top of the Collection of Custom Formats page for more information.

• DV (WEB-DL) will avoid grabbing releases with Dolby Vision (DV) that have a green hue if DV is not supported.
• BR-DISK to avoid grabbing poorly named BR-DISKs that do not match the BR-DISK quality parsing.

More info at Settings => Profiles.
To see what the difference is between the Quality Sources look at our Quality Definitions.

Settings => Quality

Here you’re able to change/fine tune the min and max size of your wanted media files (when using Usenet keep in mind the RAR/PAR2 files)

If you need some help with what to use for a Quality Settings check TRaSH's size recommendations for a tested example.

Settings => Indexers

Here you’ll be adding the indexer/tracker that you’ll be using to actually download any of your files.

Once you’ve clicked the + button to add a new indexer you’ll be presented with a new window with many different options. For the purposes of this wiki Radarr considers both Usenet Indexers and Torrent Trackers as “Indexers”.

There are two sections here: Usenet and Torrents. Based upon what download client you’ll be using you’ll want to select the type of indexer you’ll be going with.

For torrent trackers - almost all require the use of Prowlarr or Jackett.

Settings => Download Clients

Downloading and importing is where most people experience issues. From a high level perspective, the software needs to be able to communicate with your download client and to have read & write access to the location the download client reports files the client downloads. There is a large variety of supported download clients and an even bigger variety of setups. This means that while there are some common setups there isn’t one right setup and everyone’s setup can be a little different. But there are many wrong setups.

See the settings page, at the More Info (Supported) page for this section, and TRaSH's Download Client Guides for more information.

Note that Radarr does not regularly search for Movies. See the How does Radarr work? FAQ Entry for details to understand how Radarr works.

After setting up your profiles/quality sizes and added your indexers and download client(s) it’s time to import your existing organized media library.

Movies

Select Import Existing Movies or select Import from the sidebar.

¶ Import movies

Select the root path you added earlier in the root folders section.

Depending how well you got your existing movie folders named Radarr will try to match it with the correct movie as seen at Nr.5 If all your movies are in a single directory follow this guide

1. Your movie folder name.
2. Monitor - How you want the movie to be added to Radarr.

• None - Do not monitor the movie nor collection for new releases
• Movie Only - Only Monitor the movie for new releases
• Movie & Collection - Monitor both the movie for new releases & add and monitor any movies in the movie's collection (if exists)

1. Availability - When will Radarr consider a movie is available.

• Announced: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as they are added to Radarr. This setting is recommended if you have good private trackers that do not have fakes.
• In Cinemas: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as movies they hit cinemas. This option is not recommended.
• Released: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as the Blu-ray is released. This option is recommended if your indexers contain fakes often.

1. Quality Profile - Select your preferred profile to use.
2. Movie - What Radarr thinks the movie matched for. It is imperative that you review this and edit/search if the match is not correct. Mismatches are often caused by poorly named folders.
3. Mass select Monitor status.
4. Mass select Minimum Availability.
5. Mass select Quality Profile.
6. Start Importing your existing media library.

Once a movie is added to Radarr, Radarr will scan the movie's folder and attempt to match a video file in the folder to the movie. The most common cause for Radarr not matching the file and the movie thus having a Radarr Status of Missing is the filename does not have the year in it. Radarr requires the year in the filename for it to be parsable.

¶ No match found

If you’re getting a error like this

Then you probably made a mistake with your movie folder naming.

To fix this issue you can try the following

Expand the error message

and check on the themoviedb if the year or title matches. in this example you will notice that the year is wrong and you can fix it by changing the year and click on the refresh icon.

Or you can just use the tmdb:id or imdb:id (if tmdb is linked to imdb) and then select the found movie if matched.

¶ Fix faulty folder name after import

You will notice after the fix we did during the import that the folder name still has the wrong year in it. To fix this we’re going to do a little magic trick.

Go to you movie overview

Movies

On the top click on Movie Editor

After activating it you select the movie(s) from where you want to have the folder(s) to be renamed.

1. If you want all your movie folders renamed to your folder naming scheme you set earlier movie naming section.
2. Select the movie(s) from where you want to have the folder(s) to be renamed.
3. Choose the same Root Folder

A new popup will be shown

Select Yes, Move the files

Then Magic

As you can see the folder has been renamed to the correct year following your naming scheme.

¶ How to add a movie

After you imported your existing well organized media library it’s time to add the movies you want.

Movies => Add New

Type in the box the movie you want or use the tmdb:id or imdb:id.

When typing out the movie name you will see it will start showing you results.

When you see the movie you want click on it.

1. Root Folder - Radarr will add the movie to the Root Folder you’ve setup in the root folders section
2. Monitor - How you want the movie to be added to Radarr.

• Movie Only = Radarr will monitor the RSS feed for the movie in your library that you do not have (yet) or upgrade the existing movie to a better quality.
• Movie & Collection = Radarr will monitor the RSS feed for the movie in your library that you do not have (yet) or upgrade the existing movie to a better quality. It will also add all movies in this movie's collection (if any) with your selected settings.
• None = Radarr will not monitor the RSS feed, any upgrades or new movies will be ignored and have to be manually done. All searches for unmonitored movies must be manually triggered searches or interactive searches.

1. Availability - When Radarr shall consider a movie is available.

For More Information on TMDB's Dates that impact the below Availabilities See How Does Radarr Determine the Year of the Movie

• Announced: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as they are added to Radarr. This setting is recommended if you have good private trackers (or really good public ones, e.g. rarbg.to) that do not have fakes.
• In Cinemas: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as movies hit cinemas (Theatrical Date on TMDb) This option is not recommended.
• Released: Radarr shall consider movies available as soon as the Blu-Ray or streaming version is released (Digital and Physical dates on TMDb) This option is recommended and likely should be combined with an Availability Delay of -14 or -21 days.
  • If TMDb is not populated with a date, it is assumed 90 days after Theatrical Date (Oldest in theater's date) the movie is available in web or physical services.

1. Quality Profile - Select your profile to use for this movie
2. Tags - Here you can add certain tags for advanced usage.
3. Search on Add - Make sure you enable this if you want Radarr search for the missing movie when added to Radarr more info
4. Click on Add Movie to add the movie to Radarr.

• If you get an error of "path is already configured" see this FAQ entry