It was way easier than I thought it would be to get started. I put Sparky Linux on an 18 year old laptop and moved a bunch of movies and shows over to it, got Tailscale squared away, and now I can watch my media ANY WHERE IN THE WORLD. The only problem is storage. Jellyfin doesn't recognize my external drive for some reason and says the path is invalid. Is there a simple solution I'm missing?

Also I'm just stoked I was able to do this. I know I just followed a recipe, but it's a pretty cool feeling having all my music and shows right there, and I don't have to pay some middle man one red can't to access media I already own.

It might be an ownership or access issue. Try explicitly enabling read/write access to the drive with chmod.

Yeah this, 99% of the cases its permissions not being right.

Are you on Windows or Linux? If Linux, is jellyfin installed on docker or from your package manager?
The drive is mounted right?

If your media stack is containerized with docker (no idea how you installed it), you need to go into your docker compose file and grant the container access to your drive.

Linux. Jellyfin was installed via package manager. I'm to dumb for docker. Yes, the drive is mounted.

Rad. I will try this. Thank you!

Yeah I reread the part where you said you installed Linux lol. On top of checking permissions also check user ownership of the media. I believe a normal jellyfin install uses your user rather than it's own system user

Check permissions of the external drive, and set owner to jellyfin group. Give rw permissions to that group/drive. I went through similar with my external drives. It was a permissions issue.

Upgrade to docker when you can. It's not as hard as you think. And it's an extra skill. If you can handle Linux you can handle docker

Why is docker an upgrade?

Read permissions should be enough, I've got mine in a freebsd jail with the media dataset mounted into it read only.

Sounds like the server is online before the drive is mounted?
Depends on how you connected it.

Anyway: Welcome to the party and happy collecting :)

Dependency hell

I'd do read/write and enable nfo files alongside the media files.
Then I'd use an admin account for admin stuff and a regular user without any edit permissions.

What kinda dependency hell? I’ve been running my jellying server with it installed via pacman for over year and never had any problems. I admit I’ve also not messed with docker much in general but I assumed that would be more annoying cuz it would have to be updated separately and such

Also you can spin up a new server side by side to test for issues without having to restore backups.
Try running two jellyfin containers side by side.

Primarily because it makes your setup easily repeated and able to be quickly stood up on new machine

If you're on docker:

Could be that the path to the mounted disk isn't exposed. (Test: Go into docker container with bash and try listing the movies and try doing a cat textfile.txt to check read access)

Could be that even though the path is exposed the media is not writable. (Test: Go into docker container and do a touch command and see if file pops up). Not sure if relevant but is relevant for Sonarr.

Not mounted?

It could have been mounted once but is not anymore. Not sure how Sparky works but on Fedora Bazzite I had to add fstab line to auto mount the drive on power up.

Generally the rule is that if Jellyfin can see and read the files it can play them and will auto add if the path is configured.

It's easy to setup permissions and what files it can access and you don't have to worry about an update making Jellyfin incompatible with your system. Might never be an issue and is a bit more work but it has perks.

As they said already. It's self contained, so you don't have a ton of extra packages in your system. When you upgrade your system, jellyfin works regardless

And make sure the directory and internal files are owned by the jellyfin user and group. chown -R jellyfin:jellyfin DIRECTORY fixed so many of my issues

Installing Linux and running a service is hard and if you're only going to be running Jellyfin then most people would say that's the best way to go (and probably much much harder than just doing a docker-compose up command which is pretty much what I did). Well done on getting it going. I've been running it a few weeks at home, yesterday I got to test it out remotely, I was stunned that even with my rubbish home internet, it ran flawlessly!

Do you have access to external drive files with your Linux user? Can you read a modify files? If so, surely it is a file permission issue.@MostRegularPeople @selfhosted

I will do that! I asked this question right before I went on a work trip, which was a dumb move, but I'll do that. Thanks for the advice!