When adding an indexer to Prowlarr, the indexer does not propagate immediately. If an immediate propagation is desired, a synchronization can be triggered by following the menu options: System→Tasks and then clicking the refresh icon next to the Application Indexer Sync option.

Setting up a proxy with Prowlarr is counter-intuitive and here are the steps necessary to set one up:

• Go to Settings→Indexers and add either a HTTP, Socks4 or Socks5 proxy,
  • Specify a "Tag" for this proxy.
• Now all the indexers that are added to Prowlarr should have the same tag added manually when the proxy was defined in Settings→Indexers.

Assuming that Prowlarr is set up to use Tor as a proxy, some indexer definitions can be converted to use the indexer onion address instead of the clearnet address in order to avoid random blocks due to Cloudflare prompting for CAPTCHAs.

Whether recovering from a fatal error that needs a restore from backups or just wanting to transfer the indexers to a different machine, indexers are the worst configuration to lose due to each indexer having to be set up on its own, such that it would be useful to be able to export indexers on their own and then import indexers after a restore.

The following command can be executed within the Prowlarr data folder containing the Prowlarr database prowlarr.db:

echo ".dump" | sqlite3 prowlarr.db | grep Indexers > indexers.sql

will extract the Indexers table from the database and store them into a file named indexers.sql.

The indexers.sql file should be modified to replace INSERT INTO with REPLACE INTO such that upon import the old Indexers table will be overwritten. After that, importing indexers.sql is just as easy as running the following command within the Prowlarr data folder:

cat indexers.sql | sqlite3 prowlarr.db