Jellyseerr: Let Your Family Request Movies Themselves

You built the Arr stack, deployed it with Docker, and wired the automation together. It works — but only you can drive it. When your partner wants a film, they still text you, and you still log into Radarr like it’s a job. Jellyseerr closes that gap: a clean, streaming-style page where anyone in the house browses, taps Request, and the title flows through Radarr or Sonarr into Plex or Jellyfin on its own.

This is the piece that turns a media stack into a media service. Below is the full deploy and the exact integration settings that make a request actually download.

What Jellyseerr actually does

Jellyseerr is a request-and-discovery front end. It does not download anything itself — it orchestrates the apps you already run. A request travels the whole pipeline without you touching Radarr:

• Browse & search — pulls artwork and metadata from TMDB so titles look like a streaming catalogue, and shows what’s already in your library.
• Request — a user taps a poster; Jellyseerr records the request and (optionally) asks for approval.
• Hand off — on approval it sends the title to Radarr (movies) or Sonarr (TV), with a root folder and quality profile you choose.
• Track & notify — it watches the download and marks the request Available once the file lands in your library, optionally emailing or pinging the requester.

Task 1: Deploy the container

Run Jellyseerr wherever the rest of your stack lives — the same Docker-on-Proxmox LXC or VM, your NAS, or a dedicated box. It’s a single lightweight container with one persistent volume for its config.

jellyseerr:
  image: fallenbagel/jellyseerr:latest
  container_name: jellyseerr
  environment:
    - TZ=America/New_York
    - PORT=5055
  ports:
    - "5055:5055"
  volumes:
    - ./jellyseerr/config:/app/config
  restart: unless-stopped

docker compose up -d jellyseerr
docker compose logs -f jellyseerr

Task 2: Connect your media server

The setup wizard runs on first launch. It signs you in as the admin and links your library so Jellyseerr knows what you already own.

Task 3: Wire in Radarr and Sonarr — the part that matters

This is where most setups break. A request that has nowhere to go just sits as Pending forever. Under Settings → Services, add each Arr app with the same root folder and quality profile you’d pick if you added the title by hand. The official Jellyseerr configuration docs walk through the same fields.

Task 4: Set approvals and quotas

Out of the box the admin’s own requests auto-approve and everyone else’s wait for you. Tune this under Settings → Users and each user’s permissions:

• Auto-approve — grant it to trusted adults so their requests download instantly with no notification to you. Leave kids on manual approval.
• Request quotas — cap how many movies/shows a user can request per week so one person can’t queue up 400 titles overnight.
• Notifications — Jellyseerr can ping you (email, Discord, Telegram, Gotify, and more) on new requests, and notify the requester when their title is ready to watch.

What’s next

With this in place your media stack is genuinely hands-off: someone opens the request page on their phone, taps Request, and Radarr searches your Prowlarr indexers, grabs the title through your VPN-shielded download client, and imports it as an instant hardlink — while Jellyseerr flips the request to Available and notifies the requester. No admin in the loop, no texts, no logging into Radarr.

The next thing worth adding is monitoring so you know the pipeline is healthy even when nobody’s requesting — the self-healing Arr stack covers the failure mode where this all silently stops working.

Related posts:

• What Is the Arr Stack? Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr Explained — the concepts Jellyseerr sits on top of
• Deploy the Arr Stack with Docker Compose — the containers Jellyseerr hands requests to
• Automating the Arr Stack — connect the download pipeline to your media server
• The Self-Healing Arr Stack — keep the pipeline alive when a key rotates or a cron dies
• Install Plex Media Server on a NAS or Proxmox LXC — the server Jellyseerr can front
• Install Jellyfin on a NAS or Proxmox LXC — the fully open-source alternative
• How to Set Up Traefik with Let’s Encrypt — give the request page a clean HTTPS URL