The complete guide to building your personal self hosted server for streaming and ad-blocking.

Captain’s note: This OC was originally posted in reddit but its quality makes me wants to ensure a copy survices in lemmy as well.

We will setup the following applications in this guide:

  • Docker
  • AdguardHome - Adblocker for all your devices
  • Jellyfin/Plex - For watching the content you download
  • Qbittorrent - Torrent downloader
  • Jackett - Torrent indexers provider
  • Flaresolverr - For auto solving captcha in some of the indexers
  • Sonarr - *arr service for automatically downloading TV shows
  • Radarr - *arr service for movies
  • Readarr - *arr service for (audio)books
  • lidarr - *arr service for music
  • Bazarr - Automatically downloads subtitles for Sonarr and Radarr
  • Ombi/Overseer - For requesting movies and tv shows through Sonarr and Radarr
  • Heimdall - Dashboard for all the services so you don’t need to remember all the ports

Once you are done, your dashboard will look something like this.

​

Heimdall Dashboard

I started building my setup after reading this guide https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/ma1hlm/the_complete_guide_to_building_your_own_personal/.

Hardware

You don’t need powerful hardware to set this up. I use a decade old computer, with the following hardware. Raspberry pi works fine.

​

Hardware

Operating system

I will be using Ubuntu server in this guide. You can select whatever linux distro you prefer.

Download ubuntu server from https://ubuntu.com/download/server. Create a bootable USB drive using rufus or any other software(I prefer ventoy). Plug the usb on your computer, and select the usb drive from the boot menu and install ubuntu server. Follow the steps to install and configure ubuntu, and make sure to check “Install OpenSSH server”. Don’t install docker during the setup as the snap version is installed.

Once installation finishes you can now reboot and connect to your machine remotely using ssh.

ssh username@server-ip 
# username you selected during installation
# Type ip a to find out the ip address of your server. Will be present against device like **enp4s0** prefixed with 192.168.

Create the directories for audiobooks, books, movies, music and tv.

I keep all my media at ~/server/media. If you will be using multiple drives you can look up how to mount drives.

We will be using hardlinks so once the torrents are downloaded they are linked to media directory as well as torrents directory without using double storage space. Read up the trash-guides to have a better understanding.

mkdir ~/server
mkdir ~/server/media # Media directory
mkdir ~/server/torrents # Torrents

# Creating the directories for torrents
cd ~/server/torrents
mkdir audiobooks  books  incomplete  movies  music  tv 

cd ~/server/media
mkdir audiobooks  books  movies  music  tv

Installing docker and docker-compose

Docker https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

# install packages to allow apt to use a repository over HTTPS
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release
# Add Docker’s official GPG key:
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
# Setup the repository
echo \
  "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
# Install Docker Engine
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
# Add user to the docker group to run docker commands without requiring root
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

Sign out by typing exit in the console and then ssh back in

Docker compose https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

# Download the current stable release of Docker Compose
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
# Apply executable permissions to the binary
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Creating the compose file for Adguard home

First setup Adguard home in a new compose file.

Docker compose uses a yml file. All of the files contain version and services object.

Create a directory for keeping the compose files.

mkdir ~/server/compose
mkdir ~/server/compose/adguard-home
vi ~/server/compose/adguard-home/docker-compose.yml

Save the following content to the docker-compose.yml file. You can see here what each port does.

version: '3.3'
services:
    run:
        container_name: adguardhome
        restart: unless-stopped
        volumes:
            - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/adguardhome/workdir:/opt/adguardhome/work'
            - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/adguardhome/confdir:/opt/adguardhome/conf'
        ports:
            - '53:53/tcp'
            - '53:53/udp'
            - '67:67/udp'
            - '68:68/udp'
            - '68:68/tcp'
            - '80:80/tcp'
            - '443:443/tcp'
            - '443:443/udp'
            - '3000:3000/tcp'
        image: adguard/adguardhome

Save the file and start the container using the following command.

docker-compose up -d

Open up the Adguard home setup on YOUR_SERVER_IP:3000.

Enable the default filter list from filters→DNS blocklist. You can then add custom filters.

Filters

Creating the compose file for media-server

Jackett

Jackett is where you define all your torrent indexers. All the *arr apps use the tornzab feed provided by jackett to search torrents.

There is now an *arr app called prowlarr that is meant to be the replacement for jackett. But the flaresolverr(used for auto solving captchas) support was added very recently and doesn’t work that well as compared to jackett, so I am still sticking with jackett for meantime. You can instead use prowlarr if none of your indexers use captcha.

jackett:
    container_name: jackett
    image: linuxserver/jackett
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/jackett:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server/torrents:/downloads'
    ports:
      - '9117:9117'
    restart: unless-stopped
prowlarr:
		container_name: prowlarr
    image: 'hotio/prowlarr:testing'
    ports:
      - '9696:9696'
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/prowlarr:/config'
    restart: unless-stopped

Sonarr - TV

Sonarr is a TV show scheduling and searching download program. It will take a list of shows you enjoy, search via Jackett, and add them to the qbittorrent downloads queue.

sonarr:
    container_name: sonarr
    image: linuxserver/sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    ports:
      - '8989:8989'
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/sonarr:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    restart: unless-stopped

Radarr - Movies

Sonarr but for movies.

radarr:
    container_name: radarr
    image: linuxserver/radarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    ports:
      - '7878:7878'
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/radarr:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    restart: unless-stopped

Lidarr - Music

lidarr:
    container_name: lidarr
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/lidarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/liadarr:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    ports:
      - '8686:8686'
    restart: unless-stopped

Readarr - Books and AudioBooks

# Notice the different port for the audiobook container
readarr:
    container_name: readarr
    image: 'hotio/readarr:nightly'
    ports:
      - '8787:8787'
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/readarr:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    restart: unless-stopped

readarr-audio-books:
    container_name: readarr-audio-books
    image: 'hotio/readarr:nightly'
    ports:
      - '8786:8787'
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/readarr-audio-books:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    restart: unless-stopped

Bazarr - Subtitles

bazarr:
    container_name: bazarr
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/bazarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/bazarr:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server:/data'
    ports:
      - '6767:6767'
    restart: unless-stopped

Jellyfin

I personally only use jellyfin because it’s completely free. I still have plex installed because overseerr which is used to request movies and tv shows require plex. But that’s the only role plex has in my setup.

I will talk about the devices section later on.

For the media volume you only need to provide access to the /data/media directory instead of /data as jellyfin doesn’t need to know about the torrents.

jellyfin:
    container_name: jellyfin
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    ports:
      - '8096:8096'
    devices:
      - '/dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128'
      - '/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0'
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/jellyfin:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server/media:/data/media'
    restart: unless-stopped

plex:
    container_name: plex
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/plex
    ports:
      - '32400:32400'
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
      - VERSION=docker
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/plex:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server/media:/data/media'
    devices:
      - '/dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128'
      - '/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0'
    restart: unless-stopped

Overseer/Ombi - Requesting Movies and TV shows

I use both. You can use ombi only if you don’t plan to install plex.

ombi:
    container_name: ombi
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/ombi
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/ombi:/config'
    ports:
      - '3579:3579'
    restart: unless-stopped

overseerr:
    container_name: overseerr
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/overseerr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/overseerr:/config'
    ports:
      - '5055:5055'
    restart: unless-stopped

Qbittorrent - Torrent downloader

I use qflood container. Flood provides a nice UI and this image automatically manages the connection between qbittorrent and flood.

Qbittorrent only needs access to torrent directory, and not the complete data directory.

qflood:
    container_name: qflood
    image: hotio/qflood
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
      - "3005:3000"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - UMASK=002
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
      - FLOOD_AUTH=false
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/qflood:/config'
      - '/home/${USER}/server/torrents:/data/torrents'
    restart: unless-stopped

Heimdall - Dashboard

There are multiple dashboard applications but I use Heimdall.

heimdall:
    container_name: heimdall
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/heimdall
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/heimdall:/config'
    ports:
      - 8090:80
    restart: unless-stopped

Flaresolverr - Solves cloudflare captcha

If your indexers use captcha, you will need flaresolverr for them.

flaresolverr:
    container_name: flaresolverr
    image: 'ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:latest'
    ports:
      - '8191:8191'
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    restart: unless-stopped

Transcoding

As I mentioned in the jellyfin section there is a section in the conmpose file as “devices”. It is used for transcoding. If you don’t include that section, whenever transcoding happens it will only use CPU. In order to utilise your gpu the devices must be passed on to the container.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.html Read up this guide to setup hardware acceleration for your gpu.

Generally, the devices are same for intel gpu transcoding.

devices:
      - '/dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128'
      - '/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0'

To monitor the gpu usage install intel-gpu-tools

sudo apt install intel-gpu-tools

Now, create a compose file for media server.

mkdir ~/server/compose/media-server
vi ~/server/compose/media-server/docker-compose.yml

And copy all the containers you want to use under services. Remember to add the version string just like adguard home compose file.

Configuring the docker stack

Start the containers using the same command we used to start the adguard home container.

docker-compose up -d

Jackett

Navigate to YOUR_SERVER_IP:9117

Add a few indexers to jackett using the “add indexer” button. You can see the indexers I use in the image below.

​

Indexers

Qbittorrent

Navigate to YOUR_SERVER_IP:8080

The default username is admin and password adminadmin. You can change the user and password by going to Tools → Options → WebUI

Change “Default Save Path” in WebUI section to /data/torrents/ and “Keep incomplete torrents in” to /data/torrents/incomplete/

Create categories by right clicking on sidebar under category. Type category as TV and path as tv. Path needs to be same as the folder you created to store your media. Similarly for movies type Movies as category and path as movies. This will enable to automatically move the media to its correct folder.

Sonarr

Navigate to YOUR_SERVER_IP:8989

  • Under “Download Clients” add qbittorrent. Enter the host as YOUR_SERVER_IP port as **8080,** and the username and password you used for qbittorrent. In category type TV (or whatever you selected as category name(not path) on qbittorent). Test the connection and then save.
  • Under indexers, for each indexer you added in Jackett
    • Click on add button
    • Select Torzab
    • Copy the tornzab feed for the indexer from jackett
    • Copy the api key from jackett
    • Select the categories you want
    • Test and save
  • Under general, define the root folder as /data/media/tv

Repeat this process for Radarr, Lidarr and readarr.

Use /data/media/movies as root for Radarr and so on.

The setup for ombi/overseerr is super simple. Just hit the url and follow the on screen instructions.

Bazarr

Navigate to YOUR_SERVER_IP:6767

Go to settings and then sonarr. Enter the host as YOUR_SERVER_IP port as 8989. Copy the api key from sonarr settings→general.

Similarly for radarr, enter the host as YOUR_SERVER_IP port as 7878. Copy the api key from radarr settings→general.

Jellyfin

Go to YOUR_SERVER_IP:8096

  • Add all the libraries by selecting content type and then giving a name for that library. Select the particular library location from /data/media. Repeat this for movies, tv, music, books and audiobooks.
  • Go to dashboard→playback, and enable transcoding by selecting as VAAPI and enter the device as /dev/dri/renderD128

Monitor GPU usage while playing content using

sudo intel_gpu_top

Heimdall

Navigate to YOUR_SERVER_IP:8090

Setup all the services you use so you don’t need to remember the ports like I showed in the first screenshot.

Updating docker images

With docker compose updates are very easy.

  • Navigate to the compose file directory ~/server/compose/media-server.
  • Then docker-compose pull to download the latest images.
  • And finally docker-compose up -d to use the latest images.
  • Remove old images by docker system prune -a

What’s next

  • You can setup VPN if torrents are blocked by your ISP/Country. I wanted to keep this guide simple and I don’t use VPN for my server, so I have left out the VPN part.
  • You can read about port forwarding to access your server over the internet.
  • Tiritibambix@lemmy.mlEnglish
    87·
    1 year ago

    This is a freaking great guide. I wish I had this wonderful resource when I started selfhosting. Thanks for this.

    People might also want to have a look at pihole as an alternative to adguard for add blocking. It is awesome.

    I prefer homepage over heimdall. It is more configurable, but less noob friendly.

    Jellyseer is a fork of overseer that integrates very well with jellyfin. Reiveer is promising for discovering and adding content.

    • Moneo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Seconded.

      I found heimdall unreliable and not very lightweight. Considering I essentially just wanted bookmarks it made more sense to switch to an app similar to homepage.

      • Dhs92@programming.devEnglish
        17·
        1 year ago

        Hm, maybe that was purely for TrueCharts. If so, that’s my bad. However, after moving to Prowlarr I’d say it is much nicer and tends to be more reliable for my use case.

        • rambos@lemm.eeEnglish
          13·
          1 year ago

          From main post

          There is now an *arr app called prowlarr that is meant to be the replacement for jackett. But the flaresolverr(used for auto solving captchas) support was added very recently and doesn’t work that well as compared to jackett, so I am still sticking with jackett for meantime. You can instead use prowlarr if none of your indexers use captcha.

  • spaceaape@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    57·
    1 year ago

    I find Organizrr to be much more comprehensive dashboard. And Lol at running plex just to use overseerr but still streaming with Jelly 😂 just use Jellyseerr, delete plex/over, and save a TON of system resources.

  • Norgur@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4212·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for putting in the effort!

    Yet… I don’t get why using the *Arr stack and Plex is so popular. Plex is annoying as fuck and tries to shill you their paid bullshit at every corner. The Arr stack is buggy and having a separate system for recommendations and requests and for library management is super cumbersome for me. Compare that with Stremio… I could never convince the wife to use Plex with overseer at all. Stremio is super convenient.

    Im just saying this because I spent my weekend getting another Arr stack running after years of absence and noticed that the whole thing is as convoluted and fiddly as ever and that really got me wondering why people just take this as the industry standard for torrenting.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPMEnglish
      44·
      1 year ago

      I’d love to have an effort-thread about Streamio if you’re willing to write one

      • Norgur@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        221·
        1 year ago

        I might just do that when I find the time. It’s way too unknown imho. Yes, it’s not the right choice if you want to keep everything you watched, but for everything you want to watch once and be done with, it’s a better solution in my opinion.

      • billy_bollocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for putting this together. I am currently looking to build a self hosted media server and I think you may have just convinced me to go with the build you wrote up

    • ribboo@lemm.eeEnglish
      303·
      1 year ago

      People keep saying this about Plex, yet I’ve received one pop up about paying them during the last 6 months. That was while I tried to use a pay feature. Not once otherwise.

      There are plenty of apps that I can’t use due to their annoyance when you’re in the free tier. Plex have not bothered me in the least.

      Why am I not using streamio? Well, we have an Apple TV so that’s tough. Might get something else down the line, but I pirate to save money, not to save money on entertainment and spend it on equipment instead.

      • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
        154·
        1 year ago

        Why I am not using Plex:

        • It kept adding its own menu items / sections to my home screen with its shilled content like some annoying TV streams etc. Ever so often after updates etc it would keep adding it back
        • It phones home
        • Their servers has been hacked at least two times
        • They dealt poorly with the hacks so I don’t trust them to know anything about my content or usage

        Their last hack was the straw for me. I have a lifetime Plex Pass. I still refuse to use Plex anymore.

          • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            From my experience, their communication about the last security breach was slow, lackluster and left me wanting. End result was that I did no longer trust them. In reality I may have been biased and already subconsciously made up my mind about their trustworthiness. Everyone have to make their own opinion and decisions.

            • mint_tamas@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Are you referring to the one that lastpass blamed their own lean on? Which turned out to be a 5 year old, long fixed CVE?

              • Z4rK@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                lol that’s funny, didn’t know that was the cause for the latest LastPass breach. I just noped tf out of LastPass after that without looking back.

                No I was just referring to their breach in August 2022 where I guess I was annoyed that they didn’t just invalidate/reset everyone’s password immediately. Instead, everyone had to try do to it on their servers, which couldn’t handle the traffic, so then a lot were either unable to reset password, unable to set new one, unable to reclaim server etc.

                Also, when trying to calm us with mentioning everything they didn’t think was affected by the breach, it just made me realize that I’m done letting a company like Plex have all that data available to me.

                Finally, they have to my knowledge still not acknowledged how the breach took place, just that they have taken steps to avoid it in the future.

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        It’s not just popups, it’s the irrelevant bullshit that clutters up the UI.

        It’s that they’re “pushing”. A lot of people have an inherent dislike of having shit pushed on them, regardless of how extreme or avoidable it is. Plex absolutely pushes their services in the way they design their UI.

        It’s your library, afterall. It’s your computer doing the work, your Internet connection being streamed from, your network it’s running on. It’s not unreasonable to want your library to not be put next to garbage you didn’t put there.

        Also, your kidding yourself if you don’t think Plex is going to get progressively worse and more pushy. They are on a very clear trajectory, it’s just a matter of time.

    • neosheo@beehaw.orgEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      Arr and stremio serve different purposes. If you just want to watch content yourself then do stremio.

      If you want to keep certain movies yourself and want to supply a streaming service to friends and family then arr is better.

      Arr has ability to watch your content with no internet.

      If your into foss software arr is also way to go

    • Kekin@lemy.lolEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      With the Arr stack I like that I can select which torrents I want to download. I don’t know if that’s possible with Stremio?

      Also it doesn’t seem streamio is available for Apple TV. I would give it a try otherwise

    • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I loved XBMC when it was a MC for XB lol. I agree about Plex though. I have to tie into your servers for my own personal use? No thank you!

      • antipiratgruppen@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        On AndroidTV, Kodi (formerly XBMC) with the Jellyfin addon (or Jellycon addon if you’re only casting from another client, and don’t need to sync the libraries) is still a much better video player than the Jellyfin app for AndroidTV imo. It’s more versatile regarding video codecs, and so much more customizable. Also, I really like the Arctic Zephyr skin!

    • Tau@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Because if you are using Stremio (without Debris) sometimes you have to wait a long time for it to download the torrent and sometimes it doesn’t even load. I use Stremio when I want to watch the first episode of something and if I decide I want to watch the rest I add it trough Sonarr

    • DrQuint@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      1 year ago

      I wasn’t doing the whole “self host thing”, and just running things as needed, but I still got to a point where I questioned why I needed those for. I basically could do things faster by just manually searching on qBit’s external gui attached to Jackett’s trackers. The extra *arr step just made it more fiddly to setup, and gave me less control on the output.

    • Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Ive been using free plex for years and ive not seen a peep about paying for anything… except on the login screen whomich i rarely see.

      I have a browser shortcut directly to my video content sorted into folders.

  • neosheo@beehaw.orgEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    Nice. Just want to point out that there is jellyseerr for jellyfin as an alternative to overseerr.

    There is also reiverr which is new which allows managing sonarr,radarr, and jellyfin (basically it providers an interface to watch jellyfin content and also add episodes and movies to sonarr/radarr. I use reiverr for me as admin but it doesnt do requests as of now so i keep jellyseerr for my users

    There is also watchtower on docker that automatically updates your images

    And finally there is rdt-client (real-debrid torrent client) which is a real debrid client that pretends to be qbittorrent and allows sonarr/radarr to download from real debrid instead of torrenting it

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPMEnglish
      191·
      1 year ago

      It sounds like you have enough changes to make a new more modern guide ;)

  • Varixable@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    I want to echo thanks for this, because this is such an incredible resource and it’s finally motivated my lazy ass to get to work setting up my server.

    Best community, thanks again for this excellent guide.

  • bort@feddit.deEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    I recommend to use relevativ paths in the compose files. e.g.

      - '/home/${USER}/server/configs/heimdall:/config'

    becomes

      - './configs/heimdall:/config'

    you may want to add “:ro” to configs while you are at it.

    also I like to put my service in /srv/ instead of home.

    also I don’t see anything about https/ssl. I recommend adding a section for letsencrypt.

    when services rely on each other, it’s a good idea to put them into the same compose file. (on 2nd thought: I am not sure if you already do that? To me it is not clear, if you use 1 big compose file for everything or many small ones. I would prefer to have 1 big one)

    you can use “depends_on” to link services together.

    you should be consistent with conventions between configurations. And you should remove config-properties that serve no purpose.:

    • you don’t need to specifiy “container_name”, when it would be same name as the service
    • PUID=1000 and PGID=1000 shouldn’t be needed, I think.
    • sometimes you add explicit “:latest” to the version, and sometimes you don’t

    while you are at it, you may want to consider using an .env file where you could move everything that would differ between different deployment. e.g.

    • PUID
    • TZ
    • exposed ports, maybe

    consider using podman instead of docker. The configuration is pretty much identical to docker-syntax. The main difference is, that it doesn’t require a deamon with root privileges.

    you may want to consider to pin version for the containers.

    pro version pinning:

    • no unexpected changes, when you restart the container (e.g. because you accidentally pulled)

    con version pinning:

    • when you DO want to make an update, you have to spent 2 minutes to go to docker hub to find out which version you want.
    • panicnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I so wish someone would make a cleaned up version that uses something like Podman and better conventions. Honestly, it needs to be a wiki like document that is slowly updated, improved and even varied. Because when I look at these comments I lose faith in implementing the original post.

      • clanginator@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yes, a wiki is an EXCELLENT idea. IDK if there are any plans to add wiki functionality on Lemme, but man it’d be nice.

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Honestly, the original is pretty good, bare bones start up. Most of those comments are recommendations, not show stoppers.

        Like, the suggestion to use lets encrypt is kinda moot if you don’t expose to the outside world. I personally choose to add a VPN (wireguard) and access services from outside of my network through that. OP kinda mentions adding a vpn as well, I do that through gluetun.

        I’ll also take just about any opportunity I can to point out yams.media which got me started using docker for this and you can see how easy it is from this post to add additional services. You can be a real noob and still get a functional server in like 10 minutes.

        • spacecowboy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          your yams.media link takes me to an error page. I am curious about it because Docker seems to be the bane of my existence in this setup.

          • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            I fixed it (forgot to include https:// in the link so Lemmy treated it like an internal link) but this is basically just a script to setup docker lol.

              • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                I’d encourage you to dig around after you set this up. It’s basically setting up a docker compose file, and once you get how docker compose works, it’s really, really easy to add your own services. Like if you use usenet, throwing sabnzbd in here is very simple. Or if for some reason you want to run plex and jellyfin at the same time.

  • Knocturnal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    Wow, this is so detailed.

    I was looking into setting up some stuff because it seems like a fun project to me, but it was very daunting.

    Having it all here definitely helps a lot and gives me motivation to start.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    Wow. This is great, but man that seems like a lot of points of potential failure. Helpful to have a guide but this remains intimidating to me.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      You can use the guide to install just Jellyfin and Qbittorrent.

      You’ll have to do what the *arr are doing manually — search torrents yourself and track down each episode etc., then add them to Qbittorrent, then transfer the files to where Jellyfin expects them when they’re done downloading, look for subtitles etc.

      It’s not as nice as the *arr setup because it can’t “take requests”, basically you have to be the one to get the stuff that your friends and family ask for and manage it with Jellyfin… on the other hand it’s much faster to get going — and you can always add *arr stuff later, one by one.

    • thorbot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      618·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is like someone asking “how can I watch free movies” and then someone replying with how to build a business plan to run a company that films and produces movies.

      Just install Plex on any old hardware and open it up to remote access. Get a cheap pfsense firewall and create a forwarding rule. Download torrents with qbtorrent on the box running Plex and have Plex indexing that folder. It doesn’t have to be a million steps of highly complex stuff. Lastly get a pihole set up with one of the many guides out there and you have essentially the same thing as this long, terrifying guide but with was less points of failure.

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        The solution in this post is more complicated because it does more, and in an automated fashion, than your solution. Yours is simpler to set up, sure, but requires a lot of manual intervention to add content.

        Once you go through the trouble of setting up the more complex solution, it pretty much takes care of itself, content-wise. It’s like your own self hosted Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/whatever else all in one.

        Some people prefer your way, others prefer the more complicated way. I’m certainly glad someone has posted a guide, because either way I’m now aware of the steps involved and how big of an undertaking each solution will be, and can make an informed decision on which setup works for me.

      • SynopticVision@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        Honestly, I agree with you.

        Of course, if someone offered to come by my house and set this all up for free I wouldn’t say no, but nowadays with a fast enough internet connection and the right tracker you’re a few keystrokes and maybe 15 minutes away from any movie or TV series you might feel like watching.

        The 15/20 minutes saved don’t justify the massive work and maintenance to keep this all running.

  • iminahurry@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Just a tip, you can do all this even without an array of monitors. In fact, if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can even just use your smartphone with no monitors involved.