Self-hosted media, start to finish

Qar finds what you ask for, downloads it behind a VPN, and puts it in Jellyfin — on your own Linux box, on your own disks. One command installs the whole thing.

$ curl -fsSL https://get.qar.lol | sudo bash

Debian 12+, Ubuntu 22.04+, Fedora 41+, RHEL / Rocky / Alma 9. Step by step, per distribution

Version 1.1.97 · What changed · GPL-3.0

Search by name, not by tracker

Type what you want. Qar finds the release worth having across several indexes, picks a quality, and starts it. No trackers to join, no ratios to keep.

The downloads sit behind a VPN

QBittorrent runs inside its own WireGuard namespace. If the tunnel drops, the traffic stops — it has nowhere else to go. Searches route over Tor.

Jellyfin, already set up

Libraries created, permissions sorted, artwork fetched. The first thing you do after installing is watch something, not read a wiki.

Watch it while it downloads

Qar puts a live progress video in Jellyfin the moment a download starts, so a half-finished download is something you can see, on a TV, rather than a number in a queue.

Spans every disk you own

Point Qar at whatever drives you have. It allocates across them, tracks what lives where, and rebuilds its library from the files if you ever lose the database.

On your phone without opening a port

One click puts Qar and Jellyfin on your Tailscale network. Nothing on your router changes, and nothing of yours faces the internet.

Three steps, and you are watching something

  1. 01

    Run one command

    It works out your distribution, adds the repositories Jellyfin and Qar need, installs both, and opens the ports a TV on your network uses.

  2. 02

    Open the wizard

    localhost:3000/setup walks through your disks, your VPN and how much you want it to do on its own. Nothing downloads until you have chosen.

  3. 03

    Ask for something

    Search for it. Qar handles the rest and it turns up in Jellyfin — on your TV, your phone, wherever you already watch things.

Sail

A cache, so it is quick from the first minute

Titles, artwork, descriptions, the catalogue you browse — a fresh install would normally fetch every one of those itself, slowly, before anything on screen looks finished. Sail is a small cache we run in front of that. Ask it for a title and you get the answer back immediately, because it has almost certainly been asked before.

It is entirely optional, and Qar is the same program either way. Point it elsewhere and it never talks to us at all.

How Sail worksGo fully self-hosted

Give it a machine

An old desktop, a spare NUC, a VPS. If it runs a supported Linux and has somewhere to put files, it runs Qar.

$ curl -fsSL https://get.qar.lol | sudo bash