J2 — "I just want to search for an NZB"

Status: Accepted · Audience: Operator

Exercises: B1 · B2

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The journey

$ lemonfiber up search

  ✓ prowlarr       healthy    http://localhost:9696
  ✓ flaresolverr   healthy
  ✓ nzbhydra2      healthy    http://localhost:5076

  3 services · 1 profile · ~180 MB

Three containers. No Sonarr, no Jellyfin, no download client, no VPN.

Why this journey exists

It is the clearest demonstration of P2. Every other stack in this space is a single compose file: wanting to look up one NZB means booting a media server, a request portal, a subtitle daemon and four automation services.

That isn’t primarily about memory — it’s that the tooling has no vocabulary for “I only need part of this.” Forms supply it.

What makes it work

Profile closure is computed, not hardcoded (B1-R3). The search form expands to exactly one profile, which contains exactly three services.

No service hard-depends on anything outside its profile (B1-R14). This is what makes an arbitrary subset bootable — the reason partial stacks are reliable rather than best-effort. Prowlarr doesn’t need a download client to run; it just can’t push indexers anywhere until one exists.

Startup is health-gated (B2-R1). “Healthy” means Prowlarr’s API is answering, not that a process exists.

Where it goes wrong

Situation	Behaviour
No indexers configured yet	Services start fine. Prowlarr is where indexers get added — that’s the point of running this form.
FlareSolverr not needed	Runs anyway; it costs little and which indexers need it isn’t knowable in advance.
Port 9696 occupied	Named, with the conflicting process where the OS allows.
Operator later wants to download	lemonfiber up hunt adds the download clients, leaving the running search services untouched (B1-R10).

Growing out of it

The natural progression, each step leaving what’s already running in place:

search  →  hunt  →  tv
   3         6        8   services

Nothing is torn down and rebuilt. Narrowing later stops only what falls outside the new closure.

Related

• J3 Download only — the other narrow slice
• B1 Forms — the full form table