Chatarr — a fun little self-hosted chatbot to help the family find & request content

[kaj 340]

Hi all,

I made a fun little homelab project I thought I'd share. My family could never remember what we've already got, and were forever asking me "what should we watch?" — so I built a small self-hosted chatbot that lets them just ask, in plain English, and get recommendations.

It's called Chatarr. You chat with it like a person:

• "shows like Broadchurch"
• "Jason Statham movies"
• "what crime dramas do we have?"
• "is The Bear any good?"

It pulls suggestions from TMDB and — the genuinely handy part — tells you what's already in the library vs not, so we stop forgetting what we own (and stop asking for stuff we already have!). If someone wants something new, it hands the request off to Sonarr/Radarr, with an optional approval step so I get the final say before anything happens.

It complements an Emby setup rather than plugging into it — it works at the Sonarr/Radarr layer, so whatever you actually watch on (we're on Emby) it just helps you discover things and keep the library topped up.

A few bits I'm happy with:

• Free & self-hosted — uses Groq's free LLM tier.
• Web page or Telegram bot (or both) — the family mostly use a little web chat page; I approve requests from my phone.
• Per-person logins + an approval workflow, so it's family-friendly.

Open source (MIT) if anyone fancies trying it or poking at the code: https://github.com/liquidguru/chatarr

Screenshots below — it was a fun build and works nicely for us day to day. Happy to answer any questions!

 

[Luke 42496]

Thanks for sharing.