travelarr

travelarr fills your travel NAS with movies and TV shows from your home Plex server, so you can watch them on the road without streaming.

Hotel Wi-Fi, Starlink and mobile hotspots are poor places to stream from home. travelarr runs on the NAS you take with you: sign in with Plex, pick what you want to watch, and it copies the original files into a share on the NAS. Play them with Infuse or any player that reads a network share. No transcoding, and no Plex server needed on the travel NAS.

Features

• Sign in with your Plex account and pick one of your servers.
• Browse your Watchlist, Movies and TV Shows with posters and search, sorted A-Z or by Recently added.
• Copy movies, whole shows, seasons or single episodes. Unwatched episodes are preselected and the total size is shown before you start.
• Select in Movies, TV Shows and Watchlist to pick many titles at once (shift-click for a range) and copy them in one go; selected shows copy their unwatched or all episodes.
• Re-sync from Plex in Local Files for everything on the NAS or one folder, and on a movie or show page for that title's folder: compares each folder on the NAS with the same folder on Plex, however the files got there. It picks up videos upgraded by Radarr/Sonarr, copies the episodes missing from a season folder (watched ones are listed but not ticked), lists videos Plex no longer has without deleting them, and fetches every video's subtitles again (Lingarr). It shows what changed before anything is downloaded, and an old file is only replaced once the new one is in place.
• Original files only, plus the external subtitles Plex knows about (Movie.es.srt, Movie.en.forced.srt). Subtitles inside the file come along automatically.
• Same folder layout as your home library (Movies/..., TV-Shows/...).
• Downloads resume after dropped connections and restarts, and every resume is checked against the file on Plex, so a bad connection never leaves a corrupt file.
• Uses your home LAN when you are home and Plex Remote Access when you are away. Plex Relay stays off unless you allow it.
• Queue with live speed and time left, and a History of everything copied.
• Local Files: browse the share by folder with sizes, and delete movies, shows, seasons or episodes once you have watched them.
• Keeps a free-space reserve on the NAS (10 GB by default).
• Optional sign-in page with a user name and password, turned on in Settings.

Requirements

• Plex account: sign in with the account that owns your Plex server. travelarr is tested this way, on a server with Plex Pass.
• Without Plex Pass (not tested yet): at home, travelarr downloads the original file the same way Download in Plex Web does. Away from home, Plex has required Plex Pass (on the server or on your account) or a Remote Watch Pass for remote playback since April 2025, and that may also block travelarr's downloads.
• A server shared with you (not tested yet): its owner may need to allow downloads for your account.

Installation

The image is published for linux/amd64 at ghcr.io/alien4u/travelarr. It runs as UID 99 / GID 100 (Unraid's nobody:users), so the files it copies are owned like everything else on your shares.

Unraid

travelarr is not in Community Applications. Add the template once and it then installs, updates and shows up like any other Docker container, with its icon, WebUI and Logs.

1. Open the terminal (the >_ icon at the top right of the Unraid web UI) and download the template:

   mkdir -p /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user && \
   wget -O /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user/my-travelarr.xml \
     https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alien4u/travelarr/main/unraid/travelarr.xml
   

2. Docker > Add Container, then choose travelarr under Template.

3. Check the Media share path and click Apply.

4. Open it from the travelarr icon > WebUI.

New versions show as update ready in the Docker tab.

Docker Compose

services:
  travelarr:
    image: ghcr.io/alien4u/travelarr:latest
    container_name: travelarr
    ports:
      - 8484:8484
    environment:
      - TRAVELARR_NAME=Travel NAS
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
    volumes:
      - /path/to/appdata/travelarr:/config
      - /path/to/media:/media
    restart: unless-stopped

Both folders must be writable by UID 99 / GID 100.

Configuration

Everything else is set in the web UI under Settings.

Getting started

1. Sign in with Plex. A Plex page opens; approve travelarr there. It then shows under Plex > Settings > Authorized Devices, where you can revoke it at any time.
2. Choose your server. Leave the fixed address empty.
3. Turn on sign-in in Settings > Authentication: choose a user name and password.
4. Pick titles and watch them copy in the Queue.

Fill the NAS at home if you can: copying over your own network is much faster than anything on the road.

Away from home

• With the address left empty, travelarr finds your server through Plex. Away from home that needs Plex Remote Access showing as fully accessible, since Plex Relay is throttled. travelarr only uses Relay if you tick the box in Settings.
• On a VPN back home, leave the address empty too: travelarr tries the home LAN address first.
• The pill at the top shows how it is connected: local, remote, manual or relay.
• Local falls back to remote at home? Plex's LAN address is a name like 192-168-0-10.<id>.plex.direct, and routers with DNS rebinding protection (Firewalla, pfSense, Pi-hole, many travel routers) block it. Allow plex.direct there (Unbound: private-domain: "plex.direct").
• Fixed address: only for when the automatic choice fails. On a server that requires secure connections it must be the https://...plex.direct address shown in Settings; a bare IP fails the certificate check.

Good to know

• After you sign in, travelarr holds a Plex token for your account. Turn on sign-in, keep the port on your LAN or travel router, and do not forward it to the internet.
• "Unwatched" is the watched state of your Plex account at home. What you watch from the NAS is not sent back to Plex.
• A file that is already on the NAS with the same name and size is added to the History instead of being copied again.
• Image-based subtitles stored as separate files (PGS, VobSub) are skipped and noted in the History.
• Re-sync spots a new video version by its file name, size and first and last 64 KB (Plex offers no checksums), and only looks at folders that are on the NAS: a season or movie folder you deleted is not offered again.

Support

travelarr is a personal project, shared as is. Bug reports are welcome in Issues.

Credits

Co-Authored with Claude Code.

License

MIT