arr-mcp

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

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 MCP tokens (hashed) 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. One tester has reported a clean install so far (#265), and arm64 has not been tried, so the script asks rather than assuming. An install that worked is as useful to hear about as one that did not: open an issue. 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 (for Plex, its X-Plex-Token; for NZBGet, Transmission, qBittorrent and Grimmory, its username and password; a Shelfmark with no authentication needs no key), 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 an MCP token. Create one on the config page; it is shown once, so copy it into your client straight away. Each token has its own tier and expiry, see MCP tokens. 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 — :1.51 — 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

Forty 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." "What are my seeding rules, and is anything still seeding past them?" "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?" "Why is the TV guide empty, and is my IPTV subscription about to run out?" "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

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 (no minimum enforced; verified on 1.43), Seerr 1.0+, SABnzbd 3.0+, NZBGet 21.0+, Transmission 3.0+, qBittorrent 4.1+, Profilarr 2.2.0+, Cleanuparr 2.10.0+, Reclaimerr 0.6.0+, Dispatcharr 0.33.0+, Shelfmark 1.5.0+, Grimmory 3.5.0+
• Lidarr 2.1.3+ for reading, monitoring, its queue, its wanted list and calendar, diagnose, trigger_scan and stack_health: get_library lists its artists with their album count, monitoring and file state, get_media_details lists an artist's albums, and set_monitoring writes one album's flag or an artist's policy. Artists join to Jellyfin and Plex on the MusicBrainz artist id. get_queue, get_history and get_blocklist include Lidarr, remove_queue_item and clean_queue take a Lidarr download, and trigger_scan rescans, renames and imports for it. stack_health reports its disks, failing health checks and last library scan, and get_wanted and get_calendar list its albums. No release search yet.
• Docker, or Node 24+ to run from source
• An MCP client. Protocol revision 2026-07-28 is the native one; clients on a 2025-era revision are still served

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 — Emby and Deluge would both 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, and its metadata repair has since repaired both films and series on a live server (#312); Lidarr's media-server music reads were captured by a volunteer against Jellyfin 12.4.0 and Plex Media Server 1.43.5; qBittorrent has shipped but still waits on the same kind of report. The maintainer does not run NZBGet either: its adapter was tested by its contributor against live NZBGet 21.0 and 26.3 (#391). 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.

Contributors

Everyone who has had a pull request merged into arr-mcp. The grid updates on its own as new contributors land.

[Contributors]

Testing counts as much as code here, because I cannot test a service I do not run. Plex is verified because of @Svnow132 (#180) and @davidgibbons (#312).

Thanks

arr-mcp is glue; the hard parts belong to other people. Nearly every service it speaks to is free software maintained largely by volunteers — Radarr, Sonarr, Whisparr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, Jellyfin, Seerr, SABnzbd, NZBGet, Transmission, qBittorrent, Profilarr, Cleanuparr, Reclaimerr, Dispatcharr, Shelfmark, Grimmory — 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. Plex is the exception: a commercial product, but its API carries as much of the work as the rest.

When you enable the IMDb dataset: information courtesy of IMDb, used with permission, for personal and non-commercial use.

Licence

MIT