Installing Jellyfin & Jellyman

Setting up Jellyfin is pretty straightforward – for My Media Server Project originally I set it up on an old laptop running Ubuntu by just following the install instructions on the Jellyfin Downloads page.

I became a little worried about how easily it would be to back things up and port my server over to another computer (say, if the old laptop I installed it on decides to die). That sent me looking around for something that would automate a bunch of things – installing Jellyfin, backing it up, restoring to a new computer, etc. My search led me to Jellyman, the Jellyfin Manager.

Jellyman automates a lot of things for me, like downloading the latest version of Jellyfin (jellyman -vd) and switching to it (or switching back to an older version, jellyman -vs), backing up Jellyfin and its database (jellyman -b), and just having a handy way to restart Jellyman (jellyman -r).

Jellyfin Libraries

When setting up my content libraries in Jellyfin I made a conscious decision to put them in a directory structure that both I and the jellyfin user have read/write access to. Through trial and error I found that the parent directory (in my case /media/jellyfin) the jellyfin user needs to have read/write access to that directory, as well as any directories under that. (If you don’t give that ser read/write access, things seem to work but new media that you add will end up giving errors at some point – like videos won’t transcode and thumbnail images don’t get created.)

Group Access

If you set Jellyfin up with defaults, a user named jellyfin gets created, along with a group called jellyfin with just that user in it. The files I’m sharing are going to be owned by my user account (brian) so need a group that I could use it for file & folder permissions. I wrote a little script that adds my user account to that jellyfin group and kept it so I can re-run it on any computer I end up installing Jellyfin on and put myself and the jellyfin user in it:

#!/bin/bash
# make sure my user is in jellyfin group
username="brian"
groupname="jellyfin"

# Check if the user is already in the group
if ! groups "$username" | grep -q "\<$groupname\>"; then
    # If not, add the user to the group
    echo "Adding $username to group $groupname"
    sudo usermod -aG "$groupname" "$username"
    echo "User $username added to group $groupname"
else
    echo "User $username is already in group $groupname"
fi

So the setup of my Jellyfin media libraries has me creating the /media/jellyfin directory, and then setting permissions on it so I own it with jellyfin as the group, like this:

# Set permission & ownership for parent directory 
sudo chown brian:jellyfin /media/jellyfin
sudo chmod 775 /media/jellyfin

Individual Libary Directory Permissions

Each directory I create under there I just need to make sure they also have the same group ownership and file permissions. Because I found that my file permissions occasionally get set incorrectly, I ended up creating a bash script that I can run anytime I set up Jellyfin on a new computer or just need to fix the permissions. Here is the full script:

#!/bin/bash

# Define the directory path
media_directory="/media/jellyfin"

# make sure user brian is in jellyfin group
username="brian"
groupname="jellyfin"

# Check if the user is already in the group
if ! groups "$username" | grep -q "\<$groupname\>"; then
    # If not, add the user to the group
    echo "Adding $username to group $groupname"
    sudo usermod -aG "$groupname" "$username"
    echo "User $username added to group $groupname"
else
    echo "User $username is already in group $groupname"
fi

# Check if the media directory exists
if [ ! -d "$media_directory" ]; then
    # If the directory doesn't exist, create it and set permissions
    sudo mkdir -p "$media_directory"
    sudo chown $username:$groupname "$media_directory"
    sudo chmod 775 "$media_directory"
    echo "Directory created: $media_directory"
else
    echo "Directory already exists: $media_directory"
fi

# Set permission & ownership for parent directory 
sudo chown $username:$groupname $media_directory
sudo chmod 775 $media_directory

cd $media_directory
# Loop through the directories to set permissions and ownership
for destination_dir in */ ; do
   echo "destination_dir: ${destination_dir}"
   dir_name="$media_directory/"$(basename "$destination_dir")
   echo "setting ownership"
   sudo chown $username:$groupname -R "$destination_dir"
   sudo chown $username:$groupname "${dir_name}"
   echo "changing file permissions"
   sudo find "${destination_dir}" \( -type f -exec chmod ug=rw,o=r   {} + \) -o \
   \( -type d -exec chmod ug=rwx,o=rx {} + \)
#    read -p "Press Enter to continue" </dev/tty
done

echo "Setup completed for all directories."