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Notice About Application Versions

Debian has a very long development cycle as part of their intentional focus on stability. This means if you pull SABnzbd directly from APT you will almost certainly receive a version that is considered unsupported by the SABnzbd team. For example, at time of writing the version present in Debian Stable is two years out of date, and it will likely reach 2.5 years of being outdated by the time the next Stable version of Debian ships.

If your base distribution is Debian we strongly recommend using some kind of containerized solution to install SABnzbd, be it Docker, Flatpak, Snapcraft, or something else. Those options are documented on the main Unix Installation page.

Installing from Debian Backports

If you must install from APT we recommend you use Debian Backports to ensure you receive an actually up-to-date version of SABnzbd. These specific instructions are based on the current stable version of Debian 13 ‘Trixie’, but the instructions should hold true for most versions of Debian, including future releases. Just swap out all the references below from trixie to forky or whatever Debian release you’re running.

• Edit /etc/apt/sources.list with sudo / as root

• Confirm that your existing sources include Debian’s main, contrib, and non-free repos. Your configuration should look something like this:

    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free
  
    deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main contrib non-free
  
    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free
  

• NOTE: You may have other repos like non-free-firmware, that’s OK please keep any extra lines, just make sure you at least have main, contrib, and non-free and add whichever of them you don’t already have to each line.

• Add the trixie-backports repo at the bottom:

    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie-backports main contrib non-free
  

• Save the file
• Update apt: sudo apt update
  • It should show you downloading any contrib / non-free repo metadata you didn’t previously have
• Install SABnzbd from backports: sudo apt install -t trixie-backports sabnzbdplus
  • NOTE: This will JUST install the packages from backports if it provides specific versions we request (like python3-sabctools), but will prefer your stable packages if possible (like unrar)
• That’s it, you’ve installed SABnzbd from Debian Backports.

With installation completed you can start SABnzbd manually by running:

sabnzbdplus

Or alternatively, you can proceed to the How to Run as a Service section of the Ubuntu instructions to have SABnzbd run automatically on boot.