Install Sabnzbd Ubuntu Linux

Sabnzbdplus is a classic newsgrabber written in python. It works very well with Couchpotato, Sickbeard and Nzbdrone for building your automated usenet PVR system. This guide is for Ubuntu 14.04 and includes autostart on boot via an upstart script. In case you are new to usenet you need a usenet provider in order to be able to download the files from usenet servers. Sabnzbd just downloads the files from the usenet servers for you.

Install Sabnzbd Ubuntu 14.04

We need to add repositories, update and upgrade

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jcfp/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Install Sabnzbdplus, python-pip and sabyenc

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

Fire up WinSCP if you have a root account enabled, browse to and open /etc/default/sabnzbdplus or nano it if you have no root account.

sudo nano /etc/default/sabnzbdplus

and change the following, yourusername is the username you use to log in to your Ubuntu box.

USER=yourusername
HOST=0.0.0.0
PORT=8080

Restart the service

sudo service sabnzbdplus restart

Test if it starts on boot

sudo reboot

Using a web browser go to http://ip.address:8080

Build Latest unRAR

To prevent Sabnzbd unrar errors grab the latest unrar source and compile it

sudo apt-get install build-essential -y
cd /tmp
RARVERSION=$(wget -q http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm -O - | grep unrarsrc | awk -F "[\"]" ' NR==1 {print $2}')
wget $RARVERSION
tar -xvf unrarsrc*.tar.gz
cd unrar
sudo make -j$(nproc) -f makefile
sudo install -v -m755 unrar /usr/bin
cd ..
rm -R unrar*

Troubleshoot Sabnzbd Autostarting

If it fails the Sabnzbd autostart script is not working for Ubuntu then here is a possible fix that solves the problem.

Disable the init.d script in case you updated using a different guide

sudo update-rc.d sabnzbdplus disable

It can be fixed with a delay start by editing /etc/rc.local

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Paste this above the exit 0 line

#!/bin/sh

DIR=/bin

while [ ! -d "$DIR" ]; do
   sleep 30
done

/etc/init.d/sabnzbdplus start

Sabnzbdplus will now automatically start on boot 🙂

Now you have installed sabnzbd on Ubuntu 14-x, you can now configure Sabnzbd

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