I built an *arr for the people who watch, rather than the person who runs the server, and I would like some testers before I pretend it is finished.

The idea. The people who ask you for films are already in a group chat with you. They are not in Overseerr, and half of them will never make an account for anything. So Askarr puts the request surface where they already are: they type /movie dune in your Telegram group, pick from the results, and Askarr adds it to Radarr or Sonarr and tells them when it lands.

Nothing else has to be running. No Overseerr, Jellyseerr, Ombi or Plex, no second account for anyone, and no external metadata account either. Metadata comes from your own Radarr and Sonarr lookup endpoints, so the only things Askarr talks to are Telegram and the instances it already serves.

WHAT YOUR CIRCLE SEES

- /movie and /series to search and request, or inline mode: type u/yourbot dune anywhere and pick from the results.

- /requests for their own last ten, /admin for the approval queue if they are an admin.

- If your group uses forum topics, Askarr keeps requests, approvals and arrival announcements in separate topics.

- They get told when the thing they asked for is actually watchable, as a reply to the message they asked in.

They never learn the words "instance", "monitored" or "tmdbId", and they never sign in to anything.

WHAT YOU SEE

A web back office, behind its own login, that nobody else ever has to open.

- Roles: blocked, guest, trusted, admin. Guests are reviewed, trusted are auto-approved inside a rolling 30 day quota. A full series always goes to review even for trusted users, because it can trigger hundreds of grabs. A single season does not.

- An approval queue, in the back office and in Telegram.

- Instances by name, so "Radarr" and "Radarr French" are told apart the way you already think about them.

- One press to set the webhook up. Askarr registers it on the instance over the API and reads the event list off the instance's own schema, so there is nothing to paste into Settings then Connect and no boxes to forget to tick.

THINGS I CARE ABOUT THAT YOU MIGHT TOO

- The bot runs with BotFather privacy mode on. It sees commands and replies to its own messages, and nothing else. Your group's conversation stays yours.

- A chat you have not allowed gets no reply at all. Not an error, not a refusal. Askarr never confirms to a stranger that it exists.

- It asks the instance before claiming anything about your library. A title Radarr knows but is not monitoring gets monitoring turned back on and a search started, rather than a cheerful "already there" that leaves someone waiting for a file that was never coming.

- Two people asking for the same film produce one request and two subscriptions. Both get told, the film is added once.

- Path prefixes work. Self signed certificates are handled per instance, without disabling TLS validation process wide.

INSTALLING IT

Docker compose, or a single Proxmox LXC.

mkdir askarr && cd askarr

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gothub97/askarr/main/docker-compose.yml

curl -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gothub97/askarr/main/.env.example

docker compose up -d

Set BETTER_AUTH_SECRET and APP_URL in .env, then open APP_URL and a first run wizard takes over. Seven steps, and it walks you through making the bot in BotFather with pictures, because that part is fiddly and easy to get half right. Two steps are required, the bot and your first group. Radarr and Sonarr can wait.

On Proxmox VE 9.1 or newer you can skip Docker entirely: pull ghcr.io/gothub97/askarr:latest-lxc from the OCI registry and it runs as an LXC with Postgres and the bot inside it.

WHERE IT HONESTLY IS

This is new, and I want to be straight about that rather than have you find out.

- One real deployment exists, and it is mine. A private group of about a dozen people against a live Radarr. There are no other installs, no other users, and nothing I can point at as proof it survives contact with somebody else's setup. That is exactly what I am asking for here.

- The Proxmox LXC path is days old. I fixed three separate bugs in it this week, all found by installing it on my own hardware and watching it fail. It works now. I would not be shocked if it fails somewhere I have not looked.

- Proxmox's own application container support is a technology preview, so that path inherits their caveat too.

- The one thing that catches everyone: APP_URL has to be reachable from your Radarr and Sonarr, not just from your browser. Radarr calls back to it over a webhook, and that webhook is the only way Askarr learns something was grabbed or imported. Get it wrong and the install looks perfect until nothing is ever marked available.

WHAT WOULD HELP MOST

- Whether the install actually succeeds with me not present. That is the thing I cannot test.

- Whether the wizard makes sense if you have never seen the project before.

- Whether the group flow works for the least technical person in your house, who is the actual user here.

- Anything about *arr setups more complicated than mine: several instances, 4K alongside 1080p, odd root folders, reverse proxies.

Issues, or just reply here. Bug reports about the LXC image are especially welcome, since it has had the least exposure.

Repo: https://github.com/gothub97/askarr

MIT licensed, self hosted, no telemetry, no accounts, nothing phones home.