Your Arr Scripts Have a New Home (And They're Easier to Add Than Ever)
If you've been running the "Extended" containers for your media stack, you've probably gotten used to the scripts that came bundled inside them. But what happens when you want that same functionality in a standard Linuxserver.io container? That's exactly the gap the arr-scripts repository fills. It's the official home for the scripts that used to ship with those Extended containers, packaged so you can drop them into your own setup.
What It Does
At its core, arr-scripts is a collection of scripts for the Arr family of media applications—Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, and Readarr—plus SABnzbd. These are the same scripts that were previously baked into the Extended container images, now maintained separately so you can add them to Linuxserver.io containers yourself.
The project doesn't modify the Arr software or its code. Instead, every change it makes to your Arr app happens through publicly available API calls. That's an important distinction: you're not patching binaries or forking the application—you're just running scripts that talk to the app the same way any API client would. Each app has its own set of instructions in the repository (linked from the main README), so you can pick and choose what you need rather than adopting the whole thing at once.
Why It's Cool
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It decouples the scripts from the containers. Before this, if you wanted those scripts, you were tied to the Extended container images. Now they live in their own repository, which means you can use whatever base container you prefer—specifically Linuxserver.io images, which the README calls out as the intended target.
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API-only changes mean less risk. Because the scripts interact with the Arr apps exclusively through public API calls, they don't touch the underlying software. That keeps your apps upgradeable and keeps the blast radius small if something goes sideways.
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Per-app documentation. The README links to separate instruction pages for Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Readarr, and SABnzbd. That's a practical choice—you're not wading through a giant monolithic guide to find the two paragraphs relevant to your setup.
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The author is refreshingly honest about support. The README states plainly that scripts are provided as-is, that the Arr community doesn't support their use, and that if a script works once it'll generally work every time. There's no overpromising here.
There's also a notable warning worth repeating: don't use Portainer. The README is blunt about this—it's known not to work and tends to break things, and the author points to discussions in the Arr communities and Linuxserver.io along with the Servarr Docker guide as evidence. If you're running into problems and you're on Portainer, that's probably your answer.
How to Try It
Getting started is mostly a matter of reading the instructions for your specific app and following along. Here's the shape of it:
- Head to the repository at github.com/randomninjaatk/arr-scripts.
- Pick the instruction page for the app you're running:
- Follow the setup steps for your Linuxserver.io container.
- If something doesn't work, check whether you're running Portainer before filing anything—the README is clear that it's a common culprit.
Final Thoughts
This isn't a flashy project, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's a maintenance-driven repository that exists because people wanted the Extended container scripts without being locked into Extended containers. If you're already running Linuxserver.io images for your Arr stack and you've been curious about what those scripts did, this is the straightforward path to finding out. Just go in with realistic expectations: the scripts are as-is, the community won't support them, and your mileage depends on following the per-app instructions carefully. For a lot of homelab setups, that's a perfectly reasonable trade.
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