Hey guys! After over 2 years of me asking how to take the first steps in self-hosting, I think I’ve finally got most of the things I need set up (except for a mailcow server proxied through a VPS, but that’s for another day). I’ve been seeing a bunch of posts here about the *arr stack, and only recently it piqued my interest enough to really warrant a serious look. But I’ll be honest, it’s a bit confusing. For now, I’m just thinking of starting up the whole suite on my machine, then slowly expose to internet the parts I find useful (and shut down the parts I don’t). But I really can’t find any good…tutorial(?) on how to quickly get the whole stack running, and I’m a bit worried about launching individual apps since I don’t know if/how they communicate with each other. So I’ll try to summarize my, quite naïve, questions here:
- how exactly do I set up a quick stack? Is that possible? And more importantly, is that recommended?
- most of the tutorials/stacks I see online use plex for video streaming, but seeing a lot of negativity around plex and its pricing, I reckon using jellyfin would be better. Does it just plug into the ecosystem as easily as plex apparently does?
- I’ve already set up a hack-ish navidrome instance to stream music, but managing files is a real hassle with it. Does sonarr(?) do it any better?
I know most of these questions can be easily answered through some LLM (which I don’t wanna rely on) or scouring documentation (which honestly look a bit daunting from my point right now), so I figured it’d be best to ask here. Thanks for any help!
I paid 79€ or something for Plex Lifetime well over a decade ago and it’s by far the best bang for buck I’ve ever got.
It’s also dead simple to share it with friends and acquaintances safely. I know how to manage VPN tunnels and all that shit. I’m not setting that up for my aunt who lives 4 hours away. We did manage to get Plex running on her TV over the phone though.
I’ve said this exact same thing in the past and got flamed for it. The “grandma factor” is a very real consideration. My grandma lives almost 5 hours away. I’m not going to walk my grandma through side-loading the Jellyfin app onto her TV, because no native app exists on its App Store. She won’t understand what a Developer Mode for her TV is, let alone how to enable it. And even if it had a native app, the moment she has to input a custom URL for my server, she’ll shut down and say it’s too hard. But she already has a Netflix account, and understands the concept behind a login page. So I can easily walk her through Plex’s sign-in.
It’s also hard to understate how bad some of the Jellyfin vulnerabilities are. They’re straight up “people can completely bypass the login page to stream media from your server” bad. Sure, it requires knowing the file path ahead of time. And that might be a level of security… Except for the fact that basically everyone uses the Trash Guides to set their *arr’s up, which means they all have the same file structure and automatic naming schemes. And the Jellyfin devs have stated that they likely won’t ever fix many of the biggest vulnerabilities, because it would require completely divesting from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on. Jellyfin is wonderful for LAN viewing. But holy shit please don’t expose it to the internet.
I do run Jellyfin too, it’s pretty handy at getting metadata for stuff locally so I have something outside of Plex’s internal databases.
And IIRC I have used Jellyfin in the past to watch some more esoteric stuff that Plex (and its official clients) couldn’t play.
But there’s no way in hell I’m opening it to the outside world.