Jellyfin

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Jellyfin is best described as "like Emby but really FOSS".

Jellyfin Screenshot

If it looks very similar as Emby, is because it started as a fork of it, but it has evolved since them. For a complete explanation of the why, look here.

Jellyfin Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Docker swarm cluster with persistent shared storage
Traefik configured per design
DNS entry for the hostname you intend to use (or a wildcard), pointed to your keepalived IP

Traefik Forward Auth or Authelia to secure your Traefik-exposed services with an additional layer of authentication

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need a location to store Jellyfin's library data, config files, logs and temporary transcoding space, so create /var/data/jellyfin, and make sure it's owned by the user and group who also own your media data.

mkdir /var/data/jellyfin

Also if we want to avoid the cache to be part of the backup, we should create a location to map it on the runtime folder. It also has to be owned by the user and group who also own your media data.

mkdir /var/data/runtime/jellyfin

Prepare Jellyfin environment

Create jellyfin.env, and populate with PUID/GUID for the user who owns the /var/data/jellyfin directory (above) and your actual media content (in this example, the media content is at /srv/data)

PUID=
GUID=

Jellyfin Docker Swarm config

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

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version: "3.0"

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    env_file: /var/data/config/jellyfin/jellyfin.env
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /var/data/jellyfin:/config
      - /var/data/runtime/jellyfin:/cache
      - /srv/data/:/data
    deploy:
      labels:
        - "traefik.enable=true"
        - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_public"
        - "traefik.http.routers.jellyfin.rule=Host(`jellyfin.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.services.jellyfin.loadbalancer.server.port=8096"

    networks:
        - traefik_public
    ports:
      - 8096:8096

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Note

Setup unique static subnets for every stack you deploy. This avoids IP/gateway conflicts which can otherwise occur when you're creating/removing stacks a lot. See my list here.

Serving

Launch Jellyfin stack

Launch the stack by running docker stack deploy jellyfin -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Log into your new instance at https://YOUR-FQDN, and complete the wizard-based setup to complete deploying your Jellyfin.

Chef's notes 📓

I didn't use an oauth2_proxy for this stack, because it would interfere with mobile client support. ↩
Got an NVIDIA GPU? See this blog post re how to use your GPU to transcode your media! ↩
We don't bother exposing the HTTPS port for Jellyfin, since Traefik is doing the SSL termination for us already. ↩

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