Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a free, self-hosted media server for movies, TV, music and photos. It pairs with the arr stack for acquiring and organising media.

Documentation: Jellyfin docs

Install (Docker) #

Official images are jellyfin/jellyfin and ghcr.io/jellyfin/jellyfin. The linuxserver/jellyfin image is also popular.

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    container_name: jellyfin
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8096:8096/tcp"
      - "7359:7359/udp"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache
      - /srv/media:/media:ro

Mount media read-only if Jellyfin does not need to delete files. The first-run wizard asks for an admin user and libraries. Add each library with a content type and display name.

Hardware Transcoding #

Supported: Intel QSV, NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, VAAPI, VideoToolbox and RKMPP. jellyfin-ffmpeg is recommended. Docker on non-Linux hosts is not supported for this.

Pass /dev/dri into the container (the docs show --device /dev/dri/:/dev/dri/, the compose form is devices: - /dev/dri:/dev/dri, which is not verbatim from the docs). Then enable the method under Dashboard, Playback, Transcoding.

Reverse Proxy #

Add your proxy’s address under Dashboard, Networking, Known Proxies. Jellyfin then respects X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Host. WebSockets must be proxied. Caddy is the documented recommendation. See Reverse Proxy Patterns and Cloudflare Tunnel.

Backup and Restore #

• Built in (10.11 and later): Dashboard, Backups. In Docker the archives land in config/data/backups under your config volume.
• Manual: stop the container (docker stop jellyfin), then copy the config and data directories.
• Restore from an archive: start Jellyfin with --restore-archive PATH_TO_BACKUP_ZIP.
• There is no documented way to downgrade.

See Also #

• arr stack
• Reverse Proxy Patterns
• mergerfs
• Hardware Inspection