prowlarr-mcp

Part of the arr-mcps collection. MCP server exposing Prowlarr's API v1 (REST) as tools, so an LLM can manage your indexers, applications, download clients, indexer proxies, notifications, tags, and custom filters — plus run cross-indexer searches and issue system commands. The full API surface is covered, read and write.

Built with FastMCP.

Enabling the API on your Prowlarr server

Generate an API key in Prowlarr Settings > General (Authentication section). Every /api/v1 endpoint requires it, sent as the X-Api-Key header.

Install

Download a wheel from the latest release and install it as a uv tool (no repo checkout needed):

uv tool install prowlarr_mcp-*.whl

This puts a prowlarr-mcp command on your PATH. Register it with Claude Code:

claude mcp add prowlarr \
  --env PROWLARR_URL=http://localhost:9696 \
  --env PROWLARR_API_KEY=<key> \
  -- prowlarr-mcp

From source

uv sync
cp .env.example .env   # fill in PROWLARR_URL and PROWLARR_API_KEY

claude mcp add prowlarr \
  --env PROWLARR_URL=http://localhost:9696 \
  --env PROWLARR_API_KEY=<key> \
  -- uv run --directory /path/to/prowlarr-mcp prowlarr-mcp

Config

Env var	Required	Default
PROWLARR_URL	yes	-
PROWLARR_API_KEY	yes*	none (no auth header sent if unset)

* Every API endpoint requires auth; practically you must set it, but the server still starts without one so errors surface from the API rather than at startup.

Tools

10 resource-scoped tools, each covering multiple Prowlarr API v1 operations (116 total) via an operation parameter. Call a tool with operation set to one of its listed operations and an arguments dict matching that operation's parameters — the tool's own description (visible to your MCP client) lists every operation, its signature, and a one-line doc. This keeps the full API surface available while costing a fraction of the context budget of registering all 116 operations as separate tools.

Tool	Operations	Kind
prowlarr_system	27	reads + writes
prowlarr_applications	17	reads + writes
prowlarr_indexers	14	reads + writes
prowlarr_config	13	reads + writes
prowlarr_download_clients	11	reads + writes
prowlarr_indexer_proxies	9	reads + writes
prowlarr_notifications	9	reads + writes
prowlarr_tags	7	reads + writes
prowlarr_search	6	reads + writes
prowlarr_history	3	read-only

Example: prowlarr_indexers(operation="prowlarr_get_indexer", arguments={"id": 3}). Operation-level naming (prowlarr_<verb>_<resource>) is preserved as the operation value, so the full operation list is still discoverable from each group tool's description at runtime.

Development

make help  # list all commands

Command	Does
make sync	uv sync
make test	Offline tests - one per endpoint, mocked HTTP
make test-integration	Tests against the live instance (needs PROWLARR_URL/PROWLARR_API_KEY)
make build	Build wheel + sdist into dist/
make bump-patch / bump-minor / bump-major	Bump the version in pyproject.toml + uv.lock
make clean	Remove build artifacts

The release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) builds and publishes to Releases whenever a v* tag is pushed - so the usual flow is make bump-patch, commit, then tag and push.

The integration suite is read-only by default (a plain make test-integration never mutates your instance). Setting PROWLARR_ALLOW_WRITES=1 additionally runs a scratch Tag create+delete round-trip.