The core philosophy behind a modern self-hosted media ecosystem is set it and forget it. Once properly designed, the system should continuously monitor, acquire, process, optimize, and present media with minimal human intervention.
Automation tools are not optional enhancements — they are the control plane that makes large libraries manageable, scalable, and sustainable over time.
This page introduces the automation concepts used throughout Trash Panda Guides and explains how the tools in this ecosystem complement one another. Individual configuration and tuning is covered in dedicated pages.
Manual media management does not scale.
Without automation, a growing library quickly becomes:
Automation shifts responsibility from the operator to the system. Once configured:
The result is a media environment that behaves more like an appliance than a hobby project.
In a properly designed automation stack:
Examples:
This is not about piracy — it is about self-management.
Each tool in the stack has a single, clearly defined responsibility. Overlap is intentional but controlled.
At a high level:
No single tool does everything — and that is by design.
A typical automated flow looks like this:
1. You add a movie, show, or artist 2. Management tools monitor for availability 3. Indexers provide searchable sources 4. Download clients retrieve the content 5. Media is imported into the library 6. Optimization tools standardize files 7. Plex updates automatically
Each step is handled by a tool specialized for that task.
Prowlarr is the indexer management layer for the automation stack.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: Without Prowlarr, each application manages indexers independently, leading to duplicated effort, inconsistent results, and configuration drift.
Prowlarr ensures that discovery is uniform and reliable across the ecosystem.
Sonarr manages episodic television content.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: TV libraries change constantly. Sonarr ensures that episodes appear automatically, stay complete, and improve over time without manual checks.
Radarr manages movie libraries.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: Movies are static, but releases are not. Radarr ensures your movie library converges toward your desired quality over time.
Jackett provides indexer compatibility and translation.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: Not all indexers integrate cleanly. Jackett expands the ecosystem’s reach without forcing compromises elsewhere.
qBittorrent is the acquisition engine.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: Automation tools do not download media themselves. qBittorrent provides a stable, scriptable, automation-friendly backend for acquisition.
Unmanic is the media normalization and optimization layer.
Primary responsibilities:
Why it matters: Media sourced from multiple origins is inherently inconsistent. Unmanic ensures your library remains efficient, predictable, and Plex-friendly over time.
These tools are intentionally specialized:
This separation:
Treat automation tools like infrastructure, not applications.
Once configured:
If you are constantly “fixing” automation, something upstream is misdesigned.
This page exists to:
It intentionally avoids:
Each tool has a dedicated guide that builds on the concepts introduced here.
Automation is not about convenience — it is about resilience.
A properly automated media ecosystem:
When designed correctly, the system runs quietly in the background — exactly as intended.