Balena Plex Seedbox

Quickest and easiest way to get Plex and friends (Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr and Transmission with a secure VPN) running on a Raspberry Pi 4, NUC and many more.

Need more storage space for your Raspberry Pi? You can flash this Balena image to a USB drive, such as an SSD and run the whole system from there. You will get quicker and more reliable operation when not using an SD card, and can gain TBs of space for your content. Check out the Getting Started section below.

Service	URL
Plex	Stream Movies and TV shows, from your library and theirs.
Radarr	A movie collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new movies and will interface with clients and indexers to grab, sort, and rename them.
Sonarr	A PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them.
Prowlarr	An indexer manager/proxy built on the popular *arr .net/reactjs base stack to integrate with your various PVR apps. Prowlarr supports management of both Torrent Trackers and Usenet Indexers.
Bazarr	A companion application to Sonarr and Radarr. It manages and downloads subtitles based on your requirements.
Transmission VPN	OpenVPN and Transmission with a configuration where Transmission is running only when OpenVPN has an active tunnel. It has built in support for many popular VPN providers to make the setup easier.

Getting started

1. Click the deploy with balena button below:

2. Select your device and name for your fleet

3. Click the advanced toggle and Add an item under the Fleet environment variables section.

4. Configure each of your required variables for Transmission VPN with your VPN provider details. A list of supported VPN providers is available here:

   Name	Value
   OPENVPN_PROVIDER	name-of-VPN-provider
   OPENVPN_USERNAME	your-username
   OPENVPN_PASSWORD	the-password

5. Click Create and Deploy.

6. In the next screen, click Add device and configure your WiFi details if you intend to use WiFi instead of ethernet.

7. Hit the Flash button, put your SD card in to your device and wait for it to load!

8. Need more space? You can flash the OS image to a USB drive, such as an SSD and run the OS from there. You will get quicker and more reliable operation when not using an SD card, and can gain TBs of space for your content. If you have a newer Raspberry Pi 4 then it will already boot from your USB, simply remove the SD card and start the device. If you have an older Raspberry Pi, there are some simple steps you can follow to update the device to allow booting from USB.

Usage

Give your device some time to setup all the required components. When it is ready the services will be available on your local network through the following URLs:

Service	URL
Plex	http://plex.local/web where you can begin your Plex setup
Radarr	http://plex.local:7878
Sonarr	http://plex.local:8989
Prowlarr	http://plex.local:9696
Bazarr	http://plex.local:6767
Transmission-VPN	http://plex.local:9091

There is a Caddy service running to allow you to access all of these services without the need for port numbers, although it is completely optional. To use it, you will need to access each service through the URLs above and configure the base URL. This configuration is usually in Settings -> General. Set the base URL of each to the following:

Service	BaseURL
Radarr	/radarr
Sonarr	/sonarr
Prowlarr	/prowlarr
Bazarr	/bazarr
Transmission-VPN	/transmission

You are now ready to go! Access each of the control panels and start configuring your settings referring to the documentation of each service.

Boot from USB

The latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS (as of April 29 2021 or later) have many of the necessary changes for USB built-in and setup by default. If you have bought your Pi 4 recently, remove the SD card, plug in your USB drive with the OS image flashed on to it and your device will boot.

If you have an older Raspberry Pi, you will need to update the firmware:

1. Download and install Raspberry Pi Imager from the Raspberry Pi website.

2. Insert a spare micro SD card into your computer. Note that this card will be erased.

3. Launch Raspberry Pi Imager and under Operating System scroll down to Misc Utility Images and left click to open the next menu.

4. Select Bootloader and then Select USB Boot. This will return you to the main menu.

5. Under Storage click on the button and select the micro SD card. Double check that you have the right drive before proceeding.

6. Click on Write to download and write a configuration image to the micro SD card. When done remove the card from your computer.

7. Insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi 4 and power on. The green activity light will blink a steady pattern once the update has been completed. If you have an HDMI monitor attached, the screen will go green once the update is complete. Allow 10 seconds or more for the update to complete, do not remove the micro SD card until the update is complete.

8. Power off the Raspberry Pi and remove the micro SD card.

9. Check your USB drive with the OS on it is connected and then boot your device.

Enjoy!

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome, both in terms of fixes and improvements. Ideas are also welcome in the discussions section.