If anyone else is having issues setting these up, message me and I will zip the whole build to you and walk you through setup.
UPDATE:
So I've made some major progress but still have a persistent issue. Radarr, sonarr, and lidarr are set to rename files, rename folders, and move them to the root directory. Even after importing the media the do not do that. I have both the boxes for renaming ticked, I have hard links turned off, they all have permissions for all the directories involved, and they have the media available in the program. If anyone knows how to fix this I'd love the help. I literally did all of this because I don't want to manually rename 1600 files into a consistent scheme and Radarr apparently doesn't want to either.
I used yams.media to do the full install. It was incredibly easy to use for most of the installation and setup. The Mullvad wireguard setup was a pain. The VPN part of yams specifically says to follow the instructions to the letter but the link it gives is a 404. The mullvad.md it was supposed to take me to was just "TLDR" and two code boxes with no explanation. I managed to bungle my way through with some knowledge from past attempts and the yams VPN test says I'm in Switzerland and my client is ready to go.
Yams wouldn't let me set the directories I needed (it wants one directory for everything and I'm sorting them into different mounted drives) but it was actually remarkably easy to copy the yams config folders into my preferred directory and the yaml file directly into portainer to create a portainer stack running everything I needed. I even learned how to use the env and "advanced env input" in portainer to correct all the variable sections instead of writing all of them myself. All in all, it was exactly what I was wanting to do when I posted the TLDR.
~~Tl;dr: I understand docker is supposed to help get things running on different systems easily, can someone give me a copy of their working Arr stack?~~
Frustrated venting I'm past being new to this server thing having run mine for over a year so I guess I can officially say I'm just bad at it. I've been working on getting Sonarr, Radarr, and, lidarr running since 4 in the afternoon, discounting dinner that's 6 hours of constantly failing to get these to work. This is my 5th time trying since I learned about it in April.
I've given up on the automatic downloads, I've given up on the request system, I'm even done with the torrenting, I'll just do that on my phone. All I want is something that format my 5TB of media to Title (date) instead of MOVIE_TITLE_ALL_UNDERSCORE, or TB_1000, or movie.videoformat.year.special.deluxe.username.host.visit.my.site.please. I was sold on this idea that self hosting was a relatively easy thing that anyone can get into and while I have a good understanding of how a config.yml is supposed to look and work, and I've got a decent understanding of ssh and sftp between two computers, but trying to grt any one of these things to run is soul crushing. I literally work in the foster system and my worst cases do not give me the stress this does. I just want to get it fixed so I can watch Pokemon with my family and offer it to people who will never bother to log on.
~~Edit: OMFG I moved them back into individual folders and they work now. 6 hours of videos and tutorials and not a single thing saying they absolutely have to be in their own folders or it won't work.~~ edit unclear, brain stuck in toaster
Edit 2: turns out, Radarr can't find movies at /movies/movie.mkv and needs /movies/folder/movie.mkv. Now Radarr can import movies but all other problems persist.
https://trash-guides.info/File-and-Folder-Structure/How-to-set-up/Docker/#docker-compose-example
Trash guides are great and highly recommend by the servarr/sonarr team
That's actually what I followed the previous try. It got me further than anything else but it fell apart because Mullvad doesn't do OpenVPN and I couldn't figure out how to get wireguard to work. Even then, on trying to rename and organize all my files, it just corrected them in Sonarr, Radarr, and jellyfin which broke all of my manually curated movies and it left all the files with the dumb mismatch they already have.
https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/tips-and-tricks#creating-a-folder-for-each-movie
I recommend being really specific on what issues you're facing when you want help. Your post was pretty generic and so you're getting a lot of different answers.
If discord is your thing, the servarr/sonarr/trash folks each have their own discord where you can get help.
That's actually what I was trying with the TLDR. As I understood it, docker is popular because once you get it running on one system you can use docker to make it run on any system. So my assumption was that someone who has the arr stuff working could just send me a copy of their config.yml and the directory it makes when you up and then I just tweak the locations and names on my side. I get that's probably not possible but I'll take literally anything at this point.
You're not wrong but when you use somebody else's config you use somebody else's...configuration. Like if they use ProtonVPN, you'll need to use ProtonVPN as well. If they use Usenet instead of torrents, that's what you'll get as well. If somebody uses Podman instead of Docker, etc etc. So this is why it can be more difficult than just ripping configs from strangers.
This is the classic problem where the more flexibility a program has, the more fragmentation comes out of it. The *arr stack is complicated for this reason. It's a million different pieces that can be configured in a million different ways. Something like Nextcloud is much more plug-and-play. I've been doing self-hosting for years now and even I find *arr a chore to deal with.
Though nothing wrong with referencing other people's configs to get a sense of what it's supposed to look like. Start simple, look for somebody who has a radarr + qbittorrent + gluetun stack working, and go from there.