FreeNAS: SickChill, SickGear or pyMedusa Manual Install

A manual install of Sick Chill, SickGear or pyMedusa on your FreeNAS system is pretty straight forward and easy. These three programs are basically internet based TV PVRs.Tell them what shows you watch and they find when the show will next air and download it for you. SickChill, Medusa (pyMedusa) and SickGear are basically spin offs of the original SickRage (although my understanding is there was some copyright dispute which split SickChill from SickRage). It’s important to note that as far as I can tell, there is no way integrate SickChill with Jackett (if I’m wrong, please let me know). Medusa is actually more feature rich than SickChill and integrates with Jackett, but you need to have each indexer in Jackett setup separately which is a tedious pain in the ass. I’ve not tried SickGear too much (I’ve switched over to Sonarr FreeNAS: Sonarr Manual Install)and so don’t know if Jackett works with SickGear or not.

The method to install each of these programs is very similar. I’ve included the instructions below which focus on SickChill, but the steps are the same for both pyMedusa and SickGear, you obvioulsy have to adapt names and paths. Were I was able I’ve note some of those changes also. So, lets get started with an install on SickCHill, pyMedusa or SickGear on your FreeNAS system!

This article is part of my series of FreeNas setup, configuration and install articles.

Installation

So either create a new jail (make sure name does not include a space) or use the VPN connected jail that we created through this article: FreeNAS: Add VPN Connection to a Jail.

Now you will need to install git with the following:
pkg install git
It may also ask you to install the ‘pkg’ service. You should say yes to doing this.

Navigate to /usr/local folder with the following command:
cd /usr/local

Download SickChill with the following command:
git clone https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill.git sickchill
Download pyMedusa with the following command:
git clone https://github.com/pymedusa/Medusa.git medusa
Download SickGear with the following command:
git clone https://github.com/SickGear/SickGear.git sickgear

We now need to change the permissions on the folder in which it was installed. Use the following command, but if you’ve used pyMedusa or SickGear then replace ‘sickchill’ with ‘medusa’ or ‘sickgear’ respectively:
chmod -R 777 sickchill

These programs are all coded in Python and so we need to install Python in order for them to run. Uses the following commands:
pkg install python27
pkg install py27-sqlite3

Python will install to the /usr/local/bin/ folder.

We can now test and see if SickChill works by running. The following command would need to be modified for pyMedusa and SickGear:
/usr/local/bin/python2.7 /usr/local/sickchill/SickBeard.py

Then lets open the web config to see if its working by opening a web browser and navigate to: [IPaddress]:8081 If you’re able to get to the web config page then everything is working.

Automatic Start-Up

These instruction are focused on SickChill, but following the same steps with some modifications would also work with pyMedusa and SickGear. Again, where I can I’ve included the speficis for each of those as well.

We need to use the following commands to copy the startup script and set permissions:

SickChill:
cp /usr/local/sickchill/runscripts/init.freebsd /local/etc/rc.d/sickchill
chmod 777 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickchill

pyMedusa (not verified,but is there on GitHub so should work):
cp /usr/local/medusa/runscripts/init.freebsd /local/etc/rc.d/medusa
chmod 777 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/medusa

SickGear:
cp /usr/local/sickgear/init-scripts/init.freebsd /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickgear
chmod 777 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickgear

Now we need to set the system values from the program so knows what parameters to start with. We will use the following commands:

SickChill:
sysrc "sickchill_user=root"
sysrc "sickchill_group=wheel"
sysrc "sickchill_enable=yes"

pyMedusa (unverified, but again corresponds to GitHub):
sysrc "medusa_user=root"
sysrc "medusa_group=wheel"
sysrc "medusa_enable=yes"

SickGear:
sysrc "sickgear_user=root"
sysrc "sickgear_group=wheel"
sysrc "sickgear_enable=YES"

If you want to verify what variables need to be set, you can look in the script file we just copied above. You can use the following command:
nano /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickchill

Supplemental Information</h4

If you get a git error about not being able to find the path, you need to edit /usr/local/sickchill/config.ini and change the line git_path to git_path = "/usr/local/bin/git"

Here are instructions for setting up Jackett with Medusa:
https://github.com/pymedusa/Medusa/wiki/Using-Jackett-with-Medusa

Alright! That’s it! Happy Sickchillin’, pyMedusa-ing and SickGearin’!

~Raze

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