Sabnzbd is a usenet downloader written in Python. It integrates with Sonarr, CouchPotato, SickRage, Mylar and Headphones for automating your media downloads. With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Sabnzbd is much easier to run now because of the additional CPU cores and RAM. This guide will walk you through installing Sabnzbd on the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and autostarting it on boot for added convenience.

Here is a quick rundown of the Raspberry Pi, Pi 2 and Banana Pi specs. If you are trying to figure out which hardware would work best for you, consider reading the Pi benchmarks.

Pi Unit Processor RAM RAM Bus Network WiFi USB SATA Cost Raspberry Pi 3 1.2 GHz ARMv8

Quad Core 1 GB DDR2 450 MHz 100 Mbit Yes 4 No $35 Raspberry Pi 2 900 MHz ARMv7

Quad Core 1 GB DDR2 450 MHz 100 Mbit No 4 No $35.00 Raspberry Pi 700 MHz ARMv6

Single Core 512 MB SDRAM 400 MHz 100 Mbit No 4 No $25 Banana Pi 1 GHz ARMv7

Dual Core 1 GB DDR3 432 MHz Gigabit No 2 Yes $36.99 Banana Pi Pro 1 GHz ARMv7

Dual Core 1 GB DDR3 432 MHz Gigabit Yes 2 Yes $45.00

Install Sabnzbd Raspberry Pi

Install some dependencies for running Sabnzbd including par2 to repair rar files, if you are on Jessie you may need to use the 2nd line

sudo apt-get install python2.6 python-cheetah python-openssl par2 unzip -y sudo apt-get install python-gdbm python-cheetah python-openssl par2 unzip -y

Add the Sabnzbd repository and add the necessary keys. We can use the ubuntu repository since python is cross-platform

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jcfp/ppa/ubuntu precise main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net:11371 --recv-keys 0x98703123E0F52B2BE16D586EF13930B14BB9F05F

Now we install the proper unrar for arm7 to fix this Sabnzbd error 1 Warnings ⋅ No UNRAR program found, unpacking RAR files is not possible

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/bananapi/files/unrar_5.2.6-1.arm6_armhf.deb

Install the unrar package

sudo dpkg -i unrar_5.2.6-1.arm6_armhf.deb

If sourceforge is down you can compile unrar from source with these commands

If the precompiled package doesn't work you can build from source

sudo apt-get install build-essential -y wget rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-5.2.6.tar.gz tar -xvf unrarsrc-5.2.6.tar.gz cd unrar sudo make -f makefile sudo install -v -m755 unrar /usr/bin

If you didn't build unrar for Sabnzbd from source update your repositories to include the custom PPA we added

sudo apt-get update

Install Sabnzbdplus and sabyenc

sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus python-pip -y sudo pip install sabyenc

Edit the main Sabnzbd configuration file

sudo nano /etc/default/sabnzbdplus

Change the user to pi

# [required] user or uid of account to run the program as: USER= pi

Add the host port for Sabnzbd to listen on – 0.0.0.0 will listen on all available network interfaces.

I use the default port 8080 but you can change Sabnzbd's port to whatever you want

# [optional] hostname/ip and port number to listen on: HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=8080

Ctrl+X, Y and Enter to save the Sabnzbd configuration

Restart the Sabnzbd service

sudo service sabnzbdplus restart

You can now access Sabnzbd at http://ip.address:8080

To make sabnzbdplus start on boot update the init.d script

sudo update-rc.d sabnzbdplus defaults

Reboot to test it's all working

sudo reboot

You can access Sabnzbd at http://ip.address:8080 and now configure Sabnzbd

You should also install the multicore version of PAR2 for faster repairing of RAR files