Everyone else ships one MCP server per service. This is one for the stack.
That difference is the whole point, because the interesting questions live
between services:
"Why isn't the film I requested on Tuesday showing up in Jellyfin?"
No single service can answer that. It spans Seerr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd and
Jellyfin — five APIs, five sets of ids, five half-answers. arr-mcp correlates
them and hands back the causal chain:
diagnose { query: "Blade" }
No file on disk yet. Trigger a search in Radarr or Sonarr — nothing is
downloading and no indexer reported a failure.
One call. One answer. It even answers with a service down, and tells you which
part it could not check rather than guessing across the hole.
Why people run it
| |
|---|
🔍 diagnose answers what no single service can | Walks the whole chain — requested, managed, monitored, downloaded, indexed, imported, scanned — and names the first thing that explains the absence. |
| 🧮 Quality profiles that cannot do what they say | A minimum score nothing can reach, a language preferred but never required, a format scored where its wider twin sits at zero. The arithmetic ones are proved rather than guessed, and every fix names a change to make in Profilarr, which owns them. |
| 🛡️ Indexer text is data, never instruction | Release names from public indexers are attacker-controllable and flow straight into model context. arr-mcp fences every one of them. |
| ✋ Writes are opt-in, previewed, recorded | Off until you turn them on, per service. Every write shows you exactly what it would do and waits for confirmation — and lands in an audit trail either way. |
| 🖥️ A config page that diagnoses | Add services from a browser, see what is broken and what to do about it, read the logs and the write audit. No YAML required. |
| 📚 Thirty-eight tools, one vocabulary | Every list pages the same way and answers readably whether or not your client reads structuredContent, every error names the config key that would fix it, every write takes ids rather than titles. |
Nothing else in this space does the last five at all.
Quick start — about two minutes
Also in the repo as docker-compose.example.yml.
On Unraid, use unraid/arr-mcp.xml instead — a
Community Applications template with the appdata path and 99:100 ownership
already set. It is not listed in CA yet, so for now drop it into
/boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user/ and pick it from the template
list under Add Container. Steps 1 to 3 below are the same once it starts.
On Proxmox VE, proxmox/ builds an unprivileged Debian LXC
from source instead — no Docker anywhere. Run it on the host, not in a guest:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bardesss/arr-mcp/main/proxmox/ct/arr-mcp.sh)"
It defaults to 2 cores, 2 GB and 8 GB of disk — the memory is sized for the
optional IMDb ingest, not for serving. config.yaml, the bearer
token and the databases live in /config, which an update does not touch; run
update inside the container to rebuild it from the latest release. Re-running
the command above on the host builds a second container instead. If it installs
but never answers, journalctl -u arr-mcp is the log.
It follows the Community Scripts conventions but is not in their catalogue, and
it has never been run on a real host — arm64 least of all, so the script asks
rather than assuming. An install that worked is as useful to hear about as one
that did not: #265. Steps 1 to
3 below are the same once it boots.
services:
arr-mcp:
image: ghcr.io/bardesss/arr-mcp:latest
container_name: arr-mcp
ports:
- 6060:6060
volumes:
- ./config:/config
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Europe/Amsterdam
restart: unless-stopped
1. Open http://<host>:6060 — the bare host, no path. Nothing to read out
of the container log.
2. Claim it. The first page is a setup form rather than a sign-in: choose a
username and a password of at least 12 characters.
IMPORTANT
Do this before exposing the port. Until it is claimed, whoever loads that
page first owns the instance — and it holds every service's API key.
3. Add your services — Add a service, paste its URL and API key (or, for
Transmission and qBittorrent, its username and password), save. It applies immediately; there is
no restart. Configure only what you run. A config file that will not parse no
longer takes the container down: arr-mcp serves a repair page with the error and
an editor instead.
Your MCP client goes to http://<host>:6060/mcp with the bearer token shown on
the dashboard. A client that can only be given a URL, not a header, can carry
the token as ?token= instead — see
allow_token_in_url. If you already
run an identity provider, /mcp also accepts short-lived OAuth 2.1 access
tokens, so each client gets its own credential and a scope that caps what it may
do — read-only for one, writes for another, never more than config.yaml
already permits. See auth.oauth. Everything
the UI does is still just config.yaml, and editing that by hand remains
supported. Clients that read the
MCP Registry find it there as
io.github.bardesss/arr-mcp.
Works with whatever you point at it. A client asking for
Accept: application/json — or sending no Accept at all — gets one JSON object
back with a Content-Length, rather than a refusal for not also naming
text/event-stream. A client that does accept a stream still gets one. Even a
refusal is JSON. So a plain curl works as-is, and so does a full MCP client.
Image tags are X.Y.Z, X.Y, X and latest, plus main for bleeding edge.
Pin a minor — :1.6 — if you would rather approve each new tool surface
yourself. Images are published for amd64 and arm64, so a Raspberry Pi or an
ARM NAS runs the same build as everything else.
What you can ask it
Thirty-eight tools, but you never name them — you ask, and the model picks:
"What's downloading right now, and is anything stuck?"
"What aired this week that I haven't watched?"
"Which of my indexers are failing, and what did they say?"
"Find me something highly rated from 1994 I don't already have."
"Go and find Dutch subtitles for the film that just landed."
"Not that release — grab the 1080p remux instead."
"Why does this episode keep failing and never downloading?"
"Pause SABnzbd, I need the bandwidth for an hour."
"That download finished days ago and never got imported — sort it out."
"Put this series on the 4K profile and only monitor future seasons."
"This profile says it wants Dutch but keeps grabbing English — why?"
"Has anything in Radarr drifted from what Profilarr set?"
"Which of my shows have metadata that does not match the files?"
"These episode titles are wrong for the files — fix them."
"Unmonitor season 5 and delete its files." — previewed first, always.
Documentation
| |
|---|
| Tools | All thirty-eight, what each answers, and the fields whose meaning is not obvious |
| Writes | Turning them on, the two tiers, and the preview-and-confirm handshake |
| Configuration | config.yaml, the seven services that take a list, Jellyfin's default_user |
| Config UI | The four pages, and what each does that is not obvious |
| IMDb ratings | The only way to get an IMDb score for a series, and what it costs |
| Security | The threat model, walked against the OWASP MCP Top 10, including what it does not solve |
| Contributing | Which services qualify, how to add an adapter, and the rules an AI agent tends to break |
Requirements
- At least one supported service, LAN-reachable: Radarr 4.0+, Sonarr 4.0+,
Whisparr 2.x (V2 only, not Eros), Prowlarr 1.0+, Bazarr 1.4+, Jellyfin 10.9+, Plex Media Server 1.32+,
Seerr 1.0+, SABnzbd 3.0+, Transmission 3.0+, qBittorrent 4.1+, Profilarr 2.2.0+
- Docker, or Node 24+ to run from source
- An MCP client speaking protocol revision
2026-07-28
Since 1.0 the tool surface is the public API: renaming or removing a tool, a
parameter or a response field is a major, because that break is silent — a
model stops finding a renamed tool rather than raising an error.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome, and new service adapters most of all — Lidarr,
Emby and Deluge would all be accepted today, and
the list says so in advance,
along with the ones that would not be. An adapter is deliberately the most
self-contained thing in the codebase. Two things to know first: not every
service qualifies, and the bar is written down rather than decided per pull
request — which services qualify. And
I cannot test a service I do not run, so the second bar is that you tested
it against your own live instance and the PR says what you tested and against
which version.
One adapter remains unverified: qBittorrent. The maintainer runs neither
Plex nor qBittorrent — testing means running a build against your own server
and reporting what worked. Plex has since been verified
against two live Plex Media Servers by two volunteer testers, its first write
included; qBittorrent has shipped but still waits on the
same kind of report. The design behind Plex, and what else is on the
list.
AI-assisted contributions are welcome, held to the same bar and no other;
arr-mcp is itself built with a coding agent. Point yours at
CONTRIBUTING.md.
Missing a tool? Open an issue describing the
question you could not get answered rather than the tool you think should
exist. Often the answer is a new parameter on one that already exists — and
when it genuinely needs a new tool, the question is what tells us so.
Security
arr-mcp is not designed to be exposed to the internet. The /mcp endpoint
requires a bearer token because "LAN-only" is a network assumption rather than a
security control — it fronts every service credential you configure and, once enabled, file
deletion, and a home network contains guest phones and IoT devices. Put it
behind a reverse proxy with TLS if it needs to leave the LAN, and pin
allowed_hosts if you do.
Beyond the network: writes are off until you enable them, every write is
previewed and confirmed before it acts, and everything a service returns is
fenced as data rather than instruction. Security walks all
of it against the OWASP MCP Top 10 — and is equally explicit about what it does
not solve. Found something? SECURITY.md.
Thanks
arr-mcp is glue; the hard parts belong to other people. Every service it speaks
to is free software maintained largely by volunteers — Radarr,
Sonarr, Whisparr,
Prowlarr,
Bazarr, Jellyfin,
Plex,
Seerr, SABnzbd,
Transmission, qBittorrent — as are the libraries it is built
on: MCP TypeScript SDK,
Hono, Zod, Pino,
Vitest, yaml and
TypeScript. If you find arr-mcp useful,
consider supporting them first.
When you enable the IMDb dataset: information courtesy of
IMDb, used with permission, for personal and
non-commercial use.
Licence
MIT
