Where is my show?

“Where is my show?” is the most common question in any household running this, and answering it by hand means opening four web interfaces and correlating timestamps. Was it found? Was it grabbed? Did it download? Did it import? Each service holds one fragment, and none of them link to each other.

$ lemonfiber trace "the expanse"

Search the way you would say it — by show name, film title, or a household member’s request — not by an internal identifier.

What you get back

Every stage names the service that handled it, when, and the outcome. The stage where it stopped carries the reason and a remedy:

  The Expanse · Season 4 · Episode 3

  ✓ Monitored          Sonarr            3 days ago
  ✓ Found              Prowlarr          2 days ago    47 results, best: 1080p WEB
  ✓ Grabbed            SABnzbd           2 days ago    2.4 GB
  ✓ Downloaded         SABnzbd           2 days ago    took 4m 12s
  ✗ Import failed      Sonarr            2 days ago
       Permission denied writing to /data/media/tv/The Expanse
       → the media directory isn't writable by the container

The hard part — and the whole value — is the correlation. A release name in Prowlarr, a job in SABnzbd, a queue item in Sonarr and a file on disk are four different identifiers for one thing. lemonfiber joins them so you do not have to.

The stages

An item moves through these in order:

Stage	What it means
Not monitored	Nobody has asked for it — no automation service is watching
Monitored	Watched, waiting to be searched for
Searching	A search is running
Found	An indexer returned releases
Grabbed	A release was sent to the download client
Downloading	The download is in progress
Downloaded	The download finished
Importing	The automation service is filing it into the library
Imported	It is on disk, in the library
Available	It is visible and playable in the media server

The five kinds of nothing

Content that simply never appears is the most confusing case, because every cause looks identical from outside. A trace tells them apart:

Not monitored — nobody actually asked for it
Monitored, never found — the indexers returned nothing
Found, never grabbed — nothing met your quality preset
Grabbed, never downloaded — the download client rejected or lost it
Downloaded, never imported — the silent failure, and the most common one

Each of those has a completely different remedy. Knowing which one you are looking at is most of the work.

Following one season

A show is reported season by season: how many episodes are here, and what each one that is not is waiting on. Otherwise a series reads as done the moment one episode lands.

$ lemonfiber trace "the expanse" --season 4

When lemonfiber is not sure

Where a release was renamed between stages, correlation falls back to fuzzy matching, and the trace says the match is uncertain rather than presenting a guess as fact.

Where two services disagree about the state of one item, both views are shown and the disagreement is flagged. That is a real finding, not a display problem.

Where the history has been rotated away, or the item predates your lemonfiber installation, the trace reports the detail as unavailable rather than inferring that nothing happened. History is read over a bounded window, and lemonfiber states that horizon rather than implying it has seen everything.

Starting from what is stuck

You do not have to know what to ask about. Anything the queue reports as stuck lands here:

$ lemonfiber stuck

That lists the items whose downloads are stuck, each named so that lemonfiber trace can follow it on its own. It is the landing point for a dashboard that says “3 stuck” — a list of explanations rather than a list of things to go and investigate. See Stuck downloads for what to do about each cause.

Watching it happen instead

A trace answers “where did it get to?” after the fact. If you would rather watch one item go through the whole pipeline live:

$ lemonfiber walkthrough

That searches, grabs, downloads, imports and shows the result appear in the library, narrating each step. Name something, or name nothing and be suggested something likely to work. If a link in the chain is broken this is where it shows, with the step named and a way out.

Both use the same set of stages deliberately, so the live view and the after-the-fact view never drift into two vocabularies for one journey.

Scripting it

$ lemonfiber trace "dune part two" --json

Every command takes --json and prints a machine-readable form. See Global flags and the API.

What the household sees

Household members get a simplified view of their own requests through Seerr — enough to know whether something is on its way, without the diagnostic detail. That is Requests and the household.

Stuck downloads — the remedies for each stall
Hardlinks and one mount point — the usual cause of “downloaded, never imported”
D9 Pipeline trace — the requirements behind this page