this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

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I'm pretty new to self-hosting in general, so I'm sorry if I'm not using correct terminology or if this is a dumb question.

I did a big archival project last year, and ripped all 700 or so DVDs/Blu-rays I own. Ngl, I had originally planned on just having them all in a big media folder and picking out whatever I wanted to watch that way. Fortunately, I discovered Jellyfin, and went with that instead.

So I bought a mini pc to run Ubuntu server on, and I just installed Jellyfin directly there. Eventually I decided to try hosting a few other services (like Home Assistant and BookLore (R.I.P.)), which I did through Docker.

So I'm wondering, should I be running Jellyfin through Docker as well? Are there advantages to running Jellyfin through Docker as opposed to installed directly on the server? Would transitioning my Jellyfin instance to Docker be a complicated process (bearing in mind that I'm new and dumb)?

Thanks for any assistance.

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[–] underscores@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 month ago

You should know how to host something without using docker, because well... that's how you'd make a dockerfile.

But you should not self host without containerization. The whole idea is that your self hosted applications are not polluting your environment. Your system doesn't need all these development libraries and packages. Once you remove your application you will realize that the environment is permanently polluted and often times it is difficult to "reset" it to its previous state (without dependencies and random files left behind).

However with docker none of that happens. Your environment is in the same state you left it.