Been having a frustrating but rewarding time setting up my first server with some advice from you all. Learned a lot and feel like I’m almost there with a lot of it. One thing I’ve really been struggling with is public indexers on Prowlarr. In the UK I can only access them behind a VPN but Prowlarr can’t access the rest of the suite if it goes behind Gluetun.
I feel like I’ve tried everything, it seems that I likely want to use the indexer proxy built into Prowlarr but I must be doing something wrong as it’s always refused or never resolves. I did read something about privoxy which I did try and look into but no success. Considered just leaving the whole thing for usenet but I’d just love to get some public trackers working successfully in the UK. Does anyone have any advice to someone still learning please?
Thanks all!
Edit: Thanks all for your input! I got it workihg by adding httpproxy=on to Gluetun then adding the http proxy deets into the Prowlarr http proxy page.
Containers sharing the same network (e.g. gluetun) should be able to see each other’s by their hostnames, yet the VPN blocks that by its very nature, so… Check out https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/inter-containers-networking.md
Gluetun is great, but it does not work with docker swarm. I’m using a container running wireguard and Dante as a SOCKS5 proxy, everything that needs a VPN is on an internal overlay network and routes through the proxy container. Only the proxy container is part of the public network and all external traffic goes through the VPN. I use Traefik as a reverse proxy which is part of both the private and public networks. Meaning I can access the private containers (qbitorrent, prowlarr and sonarr) externally through Traefik but they cannot access anything outside the internal private network unless they route though the proxy container.
It’s not perfect but it works xD
The trash guides say to avoid putting the arrs through VPN so I only put the torrent client through. Is that what you do?
I am in the UK TOO, I use docker on a nas and I only have gluetun and qbittorrent using vpn, all my other containers (sonarr, radarr, bazarr, prowlarr) are kt behind vpn. What do you mean prowlarr cannot access the indexers? If you use the setting for the indexer you should be able to try different URLs for it, check if any of them works.
Sorry don’t quite follow. Are the arrs behind VPN on your setup? If I use Gluetun for Prowlarr then I can connect fine to the public trackers, but the information doesn’t pass to Sonarr etc. Which makes sense to me, but I don’t know how to work around it.
Edit: I’ve tried all of the alt URLs and still nada also unless it’s behind VPN.
In my setup, only qbittorrent container is using the gluetun network, all other “arrs” are using bridge non-VPN connection (my ISP uses CGNAT and I have no need to access them from outside anyway). It may be my ISP does not block those indexers alternative URL’s, my previous one didn’t either though.
FWIW, all of my *arr, and VPN containers use the same network bridge. Prowlarr and torrent use the VPN service, though having Prowlarr on there is maybe overkill. They’re all able to access one another using the bridge gateway + port as the host, e.g.: 172.20.0.1:5050
I mostly used this guide, where he suggests:
I have split out Prowlarr as you may want this running on a VPN connection if your ISP blocks certain indexers. If not copy this section into your compose as well. See my Gluetun guides for more information on adding to a VPN.
One thing I had to make sure of was that the ports for Prowlarr were included in the VPN container setup, rather than the Prowlarr section (b/c it’s just connecting to the VPN service):
ports: - 8888:8888/tcp # HTTP proxy - 8388:8388/tcp # Shadowsocks - 8388:8388/udp # Shadowsocks - 8090:8090 # port for qbittorrent - 9696:9696 # For ProwlarrI wonder if I need to use a proper compose instead of the Portainer stacks function, so they’re all on the same network withing docker.
I have VPN, BitTorrent and prowlarr in one “stack” (a project in Synology Container Manager). Everything else is bundled into a separate project. Not sure how portainer would make this work differently. I don’t have much experience with that.
Yeah that makes sense. That’s helpful thank you. I finally got it working pretty simply last night. Thanks for the help!
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If it’s anything like Australia, it’s just a matter of not using the ISP’s DNS servers. eg. Use Quad9, CF, NextDNS, etc.
I did try a custom DNS in the Prowlarr compose stack in Portainer but it didn’t help unfortunately. Do you do it a different way?
I set the computers DNS, not the container … so everything on the computer will use Quad9, etc.
Thanks, I tried this but same sitch
Omg I was doing DNS wrong in the compose. Totally works now, thank you!
Edit oh no, I thought I’d cracked it but still unable to connect.
