My new project recently has been to configure sonarr to work with transmission. The challenge was getting these two pieces of software to properly interface with each other. Sonarr would successfully instruct transmission to download the requested show but once the download completed it would not import the show to its library. The reason behind this was my torrent tracker – most torrents are downloaded as multi part rar files. Sonarr has no mechanism for processing rar files so I had to get creative.

The solution was to write a simple script and have transmission execute it after finishing the download. The script uses the find command to look for rar files in the directory transmission created for that particular torrent. If any rar files are found it will extract them into that same directory. This was important because sonarr will only look in the torrent download directory for the completed video file.

After some tweaking I got it to work pretty well for me. Here is the code I used (thanks to this site for the direction.)

#!/bin/bash
#A simple script to extract a rar file inside a directory downloaded by Transmission.
#It uses environment variables passed by the transmission client to find and extract any rar files from a downloaded torrent into the folder they were found in.
find /$TR_TORRENT_DIR/$TR_TORRENT_NAME -name "*.rar" -execdir unrar e -o- "{}" \;

Save the above script into a file your transmission client can read and make it executable. Lastly configure transmission to run this script on torrent completion by modifying your settings.json file (mine was located at /var/lib/transmission/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json) Modify the following variables (be sure to stop your transmission client first before making any changes.)

"script-torrent-done-enabled": true, 
"script-torrent-done-filename": "/path/to/where/you/saved/the/script",

That’s it! Sonarr will now properly import shows that were downloaded via multipart rar torrent.