Skip to content

Troubleshooting

o51r15 edited this page Jun 20, 2026 · 3 revisions

A practical guide to the problems people actually hit. Most issues fall into three buckets: connections, detection, and attribution.


Connection problems

A connection test passes but features don't work

The most common cause is a missing base path. If your *arr or Prowlarr is served under a sub-path — http://host:7878/radarr, http://host:9696/prowlarr — that path has to be in the URL you configure. The connection test hits the root API, which often responds either way, so the test passing doesn't prove the path is right. History and indexer queries do need the correct path.

Fix: add the base path to the URL in Settings → Connections (and the Indexers section for Prowlarr), then re-test.

A service shows "Unreachable" on the System → Status page

  • Confirm the URL and port are reachable from wherever Inspectarr runs (inside the container, if Dockerized — localhost on the host is not localhost in the container).
  • Confirm the API key is correct.
  • For qBittorrent, confirm the Web UI is enabled and the username/password are right.

Detection problems

A bad torrent wasn't caught

Work through these:

  • Is it in a category a rule watches? A rule only sees torrents in its configured category. A torrent in an unwatched category is ignored.
  • Does the rule's condition actually match? If you're catching by extension, confirm the bad file's extension is in bad_extensions. Turn on DEBUG logging (Settings → Advanced) to see per-file evaluation.
  • Has it already been processed? Once Inspectarr actions a hash it records it and skips it next time. A torrent that was handled won't be touched again.
  • Was the file list available? If the torrent hadn't started and had no files yet when the scan ran, there was nothing to evaluate. It'll be checked on the next scan once files appear.

A good torrent was deleted

Almost always an overly broad rule. Check your bad_filename_patterns for something like .* (matches everything) and your bad_extensions for an extension that legitimately appears in your downloads. Validate the corrected rule with Dry Run before re-enabling.


Attribution problems

Attribution is the part that credits an indexer with a grab or a malicious hit. If the Stats page stays empty or an indexer never gets credited:

Confirm the torrent was grabbed by the *arr

Attribution reads the *arr's grab history. A torrent added manually to qBittorrent or grabbed in Prowlarr's UI has no *arr history entry and can't be attributed. This is expected, not a fault.

Confirm the *arr URL has its base path

This is the single most common attribution failure. The history endpoint needs the correct base path even when the connection test passed without it. See the connection section above.

Understand the "(Prowlarr)" suffix

The *arr stores the indexer name with (Prowlarr) appended (e.g. TorrentProject2 (Prowlarr)) while Prowlarr's own list calls it TorrentProject2. Inspectarr normalizes this automatically — but if you've renamed an indexer in Prowlarr so the base names no longer correspond, the match can fail. Keep the Prowlarr indexer name and the synced name aligned.

Attribution builds going forward

Stats only count torrents seen after attribution started working. Torrents already in qBittorrent before then won't be counted until they're seen on a scan.


Reading the logs

The richest diagnostic is the event log (System → Events, or data/inspectarr.log.json). Set logging.level to DEBUG in Settings → Advanced for verbose per-torrent and per-file detail, then reproduce the issue and read back through the events. Attribution failures are logged at WARNING with an event like grab_attribution_no_match, which includes the indexer name that couldn't be matched and the list of available indexers — usually enough to spot a base-path or naming mismatch immediately.


Nothing scans at all

  • Confirm the scheduler is running (Dashboard or Scheduler page) — it starts stopped on a fresh launch unless scheduler_autostart is on.
  • Check the service is up: sudo systemctl status inspectarr, or docker logs inspectarr.
  • Confirm config.yaml is valid — a malformed file will prevent scans. The Raw YAML editor in Settings will surface parse errors.

Clone this wiki locally