⚠️ NOTE: The image name and repo have changed to ryakel/stream-havestarr. ryakel/sonarr-yt-dlp has been deprecated as of version 1.2.17. Please update your image and update your config.yml. ⚠️

ryakel/stream-harvestarr is a Sonarr companion script to allow the automatic downloading of web series normally not available for Sonarr to search for. Using YT-DLP (a youtube-dl fork with added features) it allows you to download your webseries from the list of supported sites.

• Downloading Web Series using online sources normally unavailable to Sonarr
• Ability to specify the downloaded video format globally or per series
• Downloads new episodes automatically once available
• Imports directly to Sonarr and it can then update your plex as and example
• Allows setting time offsets to handle prerelease series
• Can pass cookies.txt to handle site logins
• Smart rate limiting with exponential backoff to prevent YouTube throttling
• Comprehensive configuration options for bulk downloads

Sources are extracted once per scan and stored in temporary SQLite snapshots containing titles and URLs. Full sources retain their last complete snapshot if a refresh fails; the log distinguishes that fallback from a failure with no snapshot available. Snapshots require temporary disk space and do not survive a restart. Full enumeration still needs to fetch every page.

YouTube tabs stream through upstream yt-dlp's public unprocessed-result API into SQLite. There is no custom extractor or private method override. Normal yt-dlp playlist processing retains all video metadata, even with lazy_playlist; the tab path avoids that allocation. Other extractors retain normal processing. SQLite uses a small page cache, while temporary disk use grows with the source. yt-dlp still owns its page buffers and continuation bookkeeping; this is not a claim of constant memory inside the upstream extractor.

Channel searches are opt-in: set channel_search: True on a series or shared service to try 20 channel-search results, then all search results, before the configured source. Search stages use YouTube's relevance order, regardless of playlistreverse. This can select a different upload when several titles match, and rankings can change over time. Leave the option off to preserve the configured source's ordering. Use regex.require for channels carrying multiple shows and strict_parts to reject partial uploads for whole episodes. Search snapshots are closed after each lookup, so their open databases do not grow with the backlog.

A subtitle-download failure retries once without subtitle options and subtitle postprocessors. Conversion, embedding, filesystem, and unrelated download errors do not trigger that retry. A successful fallback can leave a video without subtitles. Three consecutive video HTTP 403 errors stop the entire scan until the next scheduled run. A successful download or a non-403 download error resets the counter; episodes without a match do not. Each new scan starts at zero.

Playlist extraction fails closed when yt-dlp reports incomplete YouTube data, so a partial continuation cannot replace a previously complete snapshot. Failed refreshes keep the last complete snapshot and are logged for diagnosis.

Configuration and Sonarr naming settings are read before each scan. Only playlist snapshots are shared between scans; removed sources and unused credential variants are released. Invalid configuration stops the scan without partially updating an existing client. A failed Sonarr rescan request is logged separately from a successful video download, and subsequent episodes continue.

For detailed documentation, configuration guides, and troubleshooting, visit the Stream Harvestarr Wiki

Key documentation sections:

• Configuration Guide - Complete configuration reference
• Rate Limiting & Performance - Handling YouTube rate limits
• Troubleshooting - Common issues and solutions
• Advanced Features - Cookies, subtitles, regex, and more

1. Firstly you need a series that is available online in the supported sites that YouTube-DL can grab from.
2. Secondly you need to add the series to Sonarr (the way you would any other) and monitor the episodes that you want.
3. Thirdly edit your config.yml accordingly so that this knows where your Sonarr is, which series you are after and where to grab it from.
4. Lastly be aware that this requires the TVDB to match exactly what the episodes titles are in the scan, generally this is ok but as its an openly editable site sometime there can be differences.

The following Linux architectures supported by this image are:

YouTube extraction works on all four arches. The armv7 and 386 images fall back to nodejs because Alpine doesn't ship a deno package for them; if yt-dlp ever requires deno-specific extractor features, those arches may lag behind amd64 / arm64. amd64 and arm64 remain the recommended targets.

🗒️ ARM builds have been restored as of v1.3.3. 🗒️

Obviously its a docker image so you need docker, if you don't know what that is you need to look into that first.

docker create \
  --name=stream-harvestarr \
  -v /path/to/data:/config \
  -v /path/to/sonarrmedia:/sonarr_root \
  -v /path/to/logs:/logs \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  ryakel/stream-harvestarr

---
version: '3.4'
services:
  stream-harvestarr:
    image: ryakel/stream-harvestarr
    container_name: stream-harvestarr
    # user: "1000:1000"  # match your host uid:gid — see wiki/Upgrading
    volumes:
      - /path/to/data:/config
      - /path/to/sonarrmedia:/sonarr_root
      - /path/to/logs:/logs
    healthcheck:
      test: curl --fail https://youtube.com || exit 1
      interval: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 20s
      timeout: 10s

Clarification on sonarr_root

A couple of people are not sure what is meant by the sonarr root. As this downloads directly to where you media is stored I mean the root folder where sonarr will place the files. So in sonarr you have your files moving to /mnt/sda1/media/tv/Smarter Every Day/ as an example, in sonarr you will see that it saves this series to /tv/Smarter Every Day/ meaning the sonarr root is /mnt/sda1/media/ as this is the root folder sonarr is working from.

On first run the docker will create a template file in the config folder. Example config.yml.template

Copy the config.yml.template to a new file called config.yml and edit accordingly.

Stream Harvestarr is fully backward compatible with existing configuration files. New rate limiting features (added in recent versions) use sensible defaults if not specified in your config:

• Rate limiting is disabled by default - Your existing config will continue working as before
• No config changes required - Update the container and it just works
• Optional improvements - Add new settings to enable rate limit protection (see Rate Limiting guide)

To take advantage of the new rate limiting features, you can optionally add these settings to your existing config.yml under the streamharvestarr: section. See the config.yml.template for examples.

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Credit to @whatdaybob for the original code.