58
Round Two: Can I manage to set up Jellyfin correctly this time?
(self.selfhosted)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
58 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
50550 readers
378 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I still don't recommend putting jellyfin on the Internet. It's not designed for it. There are some API endpoints you can access without authentication, not to mention potential authentication bypass vulnerabilities.
5 minutes is also probably too frequent. Leases are usually significantly longer. You might hit a rate limit and get blocked.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll back the refresh rate off to be safe.
I’m not sure I entirely understand your concern about putting Jellyfin on the internet. A large part of my interest in selfhosting is being able host my own music library, my own cloud storage, etc, and access it as an alternative to Spotify or Google Drive. Doesn’t that inherently mean that they need to be on the internet, if I want to be able to access them when I’m away from home?
My goal has been to find a way to do that safely, but if that’s not possible, that’s good to know too, so I don’t keep trying to do the impossible.
I just finished refining my Jellyfin setup. I use caddy as reverse proxy and use authelia as authentication in front of Jellyfin. This way only users logged in to authelia can access my Jellyfin. And there is an SSO plugin for jellyfin to avoid double login. The tricky part was getting apps to work.
It's honestly just a matter of how much risk you are comfortable with for using jellyfin on the open internet.
(If i remember correctly:) The unauthenticated routes thing can only be used for streaming your content without a login (if you can guess the contents ids on your server I believe).
In my opinion, it's not worth the hassle of using a vpn because I don't think this risk is worth mitigating with one.
But everyone has their own personal risk assesment of course.
P.s. Easier than a VPN, at least for logging in other users, would be to use some type of proxy authentication like Authelia. I believe jellyfin has a plugin you can use. It can be complicated to setup, but it's an option. I believe it should protect all routes exposed by jellyfin so that solves the unauthenticated streaming issue. (I still dont think this is necessary but more choice for the risk-adverse!).
https://github.com/authelia/authelia
Yes, those are the known vulnerabilities. We don't know how many unknown vulnerabilities could be discovered in the future.
Unfortunately no software exists that is fully perfect in this regard (any program could have multiple bugs just waiting to be found), but jellyfin being open source puts it in a better situation for finding vulnerabilities sooner.
At least we are more likely to hear about them than we would for PMS. Quickest way to find vulnerabilities is to have as many eyes as possible on it, if you only let the 20 devs you employ look a lot can be missed. Just my opinion though.
Wireguard or tailscale are much better ways of accessing jellyfin from outside your network.
What if I want a bunch of people to be able to log into my library via Finamp?
I use Nginx Proxy Manager and whitelist my remote users. They all have static IPs though, so its a workable solution for me.
Before I used a whitelist I would go through the access logs, and could never find any attempts to exploit the endpoints - only some random bots trying to find some admin page assuming it was another service. Not saying you shouldn't take it seriously, but you are likely not subject to these attacks the moment you expose it.
That said, there is a discussion about these endpoints on their repo. At some point they will be fixed (my impression is that they are hampered by legacy Emby code). When they do, you could do this more securely.
Provide them with VPN access. If that's too much for them, then they don't get access. Tough. On the scale of security vs convenience, that's nothing.
If you really really want, you should at least see if you can put a WAF in front, and put the server itself somewhere it doesn't have access to the rest of your network (a DMZ) so that if and when it gets hacked, it doesn't compromise the entire network.
I highly recommend Tailscale, you can share machines/services with unlimited friends on the free tier, and all of the actual auth stuff is handled by someone who isn't me.