I keep jellyfin up to date in a container and forward tcp/8920 on my router to the container. Easy and plenty secure. People in this thread are wildly overthinking it.

I just expose my local machine to the internet, unsecured

I think my approach is probably the most insane one, reading this thread…

So the only thing I expose to the public internet is a homemade reverse proxy application which supports both form based and basic authentication. The only thing anonymous users have access to is the form login page. I’m on top of security updates with its dependencies and thus far I haven’t had any issues, ever. It runs in a docker container, on a VM, on Proxmox. My Jellyfin instance is in k8s.

My mum wanted to watch some stuff on my Jellyfin instance on her Chromecast With Google TV, plugged into her ancient Dumb TV. There is a Jellyfin Android TV app. I couldn’t think of a nice way to run a VPN on Android TV or on any of her (non-existent) network infra.

So instead I forked the Jellyfin Android TV app codebase. I found all the places where the API calls are made to the backend (there are multiple). I slapped in basic auth credentials. Recompiled the app. Deployed it to her Chromecast via developer mode.

Solid af so far. I haven’t updated Jellyfin since then (6 months), but when I need to, I’ll update the fork and redeploy it on her Chromecast.

For now just Tailscale but I'm working on setting up a reverse proxy and SSO through Authentik

Tailscale with self hosted headscale

I used to do all the things mentioned here. Now, I just use Wireguard. If a family member wants to use a service, they need Wireguard. If they don't want to install it, they dont get the service.

Nginx in front of it, open ports for https (and ssh), nothing more. Let's encrypt certificate and you're good to go.

Wireguard.

I host it publicly accessible behind a proper firewall and reverse proxy setup.

If you are only ever using Jellyfin from your own, wireguard configured phone, then that's great; but there's nothing wrong with hosting Jellyfin publicly.

I think one of these days I need to make a "myth-busting" post about this topic.

If you’re a beginner and you’re looking for the most secure way with least amount of effort, just VPN into your home network using something like WireGuard, or use an off the shelf mesh vpn like Tailscale to connect directly to your JF server. You can give access to your VPN to other people to use. Tailscale would be the easiest to do this with, but if you want to go full self-hosted you can do it with WireGuard if you’re willing to put in a little extra leg work.

What I’ve done in the past is run a reverse proxy on a cloud VPS and tunnel that to the JF server. The cloud VPS acts as a reverse proxy and a web application firewall which blocks common exploits, failed connection attempts etc. you can take it one step beyond that if you want people to authenticate BEFORE they reach your server by using an oauth provider and whatever forward Auth your reverse proxy software supports.

for me the easiest option was to set up tailscale on the server or network where jellyfin runs and then on the client/router where you want to watch the stream.

I see everyone in this thread recommending a VPN or reverse proxy for accessing Jellyfin from outside the LAN. While I generally agree, I don't see a realistic risk in exposing Jellyfin directly to the internet. ~~It supports HTTPS and certificates nowadays, so there’s no need for outside SSL termination anymore.~~ (See Edit 2)

In my setup, which I've been running for some time, I've port-forwarded only Jellyfin's HTTPS port to eliminate the possibility of someone ending up on pure HTTP and sending credentials unencrypted. I've also changed the Jellyfin's default port to a non-standard one to avoid basic port-scanning bots spamming login attempts. I fully understand that this falls into the security through obscurity category, but no harm in it either.

Anyone wanna yell at me for being an idiot and doing everything wrong? I'm genuinely curious, as the sentiment online seems to be that at least a reverse proxy is almost mandatory for this kind of setup, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Edit: Thank you everyone for your responses. While I don't agree with everything, the new insight is appreciated.

Edit 2: I've been informed that infact the support for HTTPS will be removed in a future version. From v10.11 release notes:

Deprecation Notice: Jellyfin’s internal handling of TLS/SSL certificates and configuration in the web server will be removed in a future version. No changes to the current system have been made in 10.11, however future versions will remove the current system and instead will provide advanced instructions to configure the Kestrel webserver directly for this relatively niche usecase. We strongly advise anyone using the current TLS options to use a Reverse Proxy for TLS termination instead if at all possible, as this provides a number of benefits

Sad that mTLS support is non existent because it solves this problem.

Cloudflare. No public exposure to the internet.

I access it through a reverse proxy (nginx). I guess the only weak point is if someone finds out the domain for it and starts spamming the login screen. But I've restricted access to the domain for most of the world anyway. Wireguard would probably be more secure but its not always possible if like on vacation and want to use it on the TV there..

“Technically” my jellyfin is exposed to the internet however, I have Fail2Ban setup blocking every public IP and only whitelisting IP’s that I’ve verified.

I use GeoBlock for the services I want exposed to the internet however, I should also setup Authelia or something along those lines for further verification.

Reverse proxy is Traefik.

We have it open to the public, behind a load balancer URL filtering incomming connection, https proxied through cloudflare with a country filter in place

Tailscale