Prowlarr indexers ​

The Prowlarr plugin feeds BackIssue's built-in Usenet and Torrent sources with the indexers your Prowlarr instance manages — configure Prowlarr once instead of listing each indexer by hand. Its usenet indexers feed the Usenet source; its torrent indexers feed Torrents.

Prowlarr only finds releases. The actual download still goes through your download client (SABnzbd/NZBGet and/or qBittorrent), so enable Usenet and/or Torrents with a client as usual — see Download sources.

Setup ​

Install the plugin from Sidebar → Plugins, then enable it in Settings → Sources → Prowlarr:

• Prowlarr URL — e.g. http://prowlarr:9696.
• API key — in Prowlarr under Settings → General → Security.
• Indexers — press Load to list your Prowlarr indexers, then tick the ones BackIssue should search. All are used by default, and an indexer you later add in Prowlarr is picked up automatically.

Test connection confirms reachability and reports how many usenet/torrent indexers are enabled.

Settings ​

The indexer list itself is cached for five minutes so a burst of per-issue searches doesn't hammer Prowlarr. Your ticks are applied after that cache, so changing the selection never means waiting for it to expire.

Managed indexers ​

While Prowlarr is enabled, the manually entered Newznab/Torznab indexer lists on the Usenet and Torrents panels are ignored — they grey out with a "managed" note. Turn Prowlarr off to fall back to them.

Search behaviour is otherwise identical to hand-configured indexers: results merge across every indexer, the strict series-and-number matcher filters them, and grabs ride your source priority and download clients.

Priority: whose ordering wins ​

Prowlarr's own per-indexer priority is not used. BackIssue asks Prowlarr for its indexer list and searches every one you've ticked; nothing in that list's order or priority field survives the trip. So don't expect a priority-1 indexer in Prowlarr to be preferred here.

What actually decides what you get:

1. Source priority picks the source — Usenet before Torrents, or whatever order you dragged them into. Prowlarr isn't a source of its own; it only supplies indexers to those two.
2. Within a source, every selected indexer is searched and the results pooled and de-duplicated.
3. The pooled releases are ranked by how well they match the series and issue number, and larger files win ties.

If you want one indexer preferred over another, the lever is the tick box, not Prowlarr's priority: untick the ones you'd rather not pull from.

Troubleshooting ​

• Test says "Unauthorized" — the API key is wrong. Copy it again from Prowlarr's Settings → General → Security.
• "Response was not JSON" or an HTTP error — the URL isn't Prowlarr's base URL. No trailing path, no indexer feed URL; just scheme, host and port. From a container, localhost means the container itself — use the service name or the host's LAN address.
• "Connected, but Prowlarr has no enabled indexers yet" — the connection is fine and Prowlarr genuinely has nothing enabled. Add indexers there first.
• Prowlarr unreachable — BackIssue falls back to the last indexer list it fetched, so searches carry on against a list that may be out of date; after a restart it has no list at all and the source quietly finds nothing. Either way the giveaway is prowlarr: indexer list failed in System → Logs.
• An indexer that returns nothing for comics — most likely it doesn't file comics under categories 7000/7030 (common on torrent trackers, which tag them inconsistently), or doesn't carry comics at all. Search the same series in Prowlarr's own search, restricted to those categories: if Prowlarr finds nothing either, untick the indexer here.
• Everything else lands in System → Logs alongside the rest of the download pipeline — searches, grabs and the reason a release was rejected.