Hello. I have just recently started with self hosting my media with Jellyfin… and I am LOVING it! I had been carrying around media players for decades, with everyone looking at me like an insane crank for not giving up on my hundreds of gigs of media for SAS things like spotify… now they’re jealous! We’ve come full circle!
Annnyway. Obviously, I want to access the server anywhere, and don’t want to just raw-dog an open port to the internet- yikes!
There are SO MANY ways and guides and thoughts on this, I’m a bit overwhelmed and looking for your thoughts on the best way to start off… it doesn’t have to be ‘fort knox’ and I am sure I’ll adjust and pivot as I learn more… but here are the options I know of (did I miss any?):
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Tailscale VPN connection
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Reverse Proxy with Caddy or similar (this is recommended as easy in the jellyfin official guides and thus is my current leading contender!)
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Docker/VM ‘containerized’ server with permissions/access control
What are your thoughts on the beginner-friendly-ness and ease of setup/management of these? This is exclusively for use by me and my family, so I don’t need something that’s easy for anyone to access with credentials… just our handful of devices.
Please don’t laugh, but I’m currently hosting on a Raspberry Pi5 with a big-ass harddrive attached (using CasaOS on a headless Ubuntu Server). I know this is JANK as far as self-hosting goes, and plan to upgrade to something like NAS in the future, but I’m still researching and learning, and aside from shitty video transcoding, it’s working fine for now… Thank you in advance for your advice, help and thoughts!
VPN. Jellyfin is not intended for direct exposure to the Internet.
You should run it in docker anyway for convenience. A reverse proxy is optional, but I use traefik also for convenience (so that I can just use domain names on the same port, and so that it can automatically fetch certs).
I think the big deciding factor is how many folks will be watching remotely.
For my case, I use a VPN to tunnel back to my network and watch jellyfin that way. My son also lives away and watches jellyfin, but for him I simply punch a hole in my firewall for only his public ip, which doesn’t change much.
This works for me, but if I had to host for any more ppl, I would likely go the caddy route.
I hide it behind Cloudflare. I assume that since most of the world pays them for domain security, and if Cloudflare goes down so does half the internet, I thought to try them out. Best decision I’ve made. They blocked substantial DDoS attempts on my IP, a fuck ton of malicious web scrapers that attempt CVEs, and they also allow me to have very specific users access to my domain using complex allow lists, zero-trust, and DNS over HTTPS.
I heard something about cloudflare not being stream friendly. Guess jellyfin doesn’t count?
not the person you replied to, but i have been using cloudflare zero trust for my streaming needs; have not gotten a complaint yet.
just make sure you have the upload bandwidth.
used to be against terms of use for proxy, the forbidding language has been gone for a year or two now
So… do you have to register the server as a domain, then set up and register it w cloudflare?
I have used Tailscale for about a year now. Flawless for a small ecosystem and couple of people and doesnt expose anything.
Bonus of routing all my traffic through pi-hole at home and then through VPN client on router
I second this. Especially for the PiHole access. Its also handy as it covers any of my self-hosted stuffs.
Do you mind explaining PiHole to me? I’ve heard it mentioned, not sure what it is.
i only use it for my family so like just me, my brother, and my parents so i just spun up a subdomain and configured apache to reverse proxy and use certbot for a lets encrypt certificate so i’m not exposing my port or ip. (the subdomain is just hosted on an ec2 server that i was using anyway)
Wireguard tunnels with a ssh tunnel as a backup.
I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.
I hadn’t thought to automate connecting to Wireguard when not on my home network, that’s a good call. I’ve just set up Tasker on my phone and tablet.
Caddy + crowd sec + some kind of auth solution is what I’m aiming for though I haven’t got authentik working with it yet so I haven’t opened it up yet. I wouldn’t want to do jellyfish without the auth solution though as there local stuff isn’t so robust.
VPN in and a few local users would be the most secure if you haven’t got too many folks connecting.
Waiting for replies.
