Nothing crazy in this post, I just wanna brag about setting up nginx for my media server.

My media sharing journey has been long, with a number of huge upgrades to my setup. I started in January, where I would torrent movies and shows and stream them over discord to my girlfriend.

In February, the wonderful people of the fediverse convinced me to try Linux, so I installed Fedora Linux on my pc (I absolutely love it and will never go back), I learned so much about Linux in just a few weeks, and wanted to try self hosting, so I installed jellyfin on my computer for just me and my girlfriend.

In late February (maybe March?), I got a homelab server running to install jellyfin, I had nothing else on it, jellyfin wasn’t even installed through docker (I was afraid of docker). I would manually transfer torrented movies/shows from my pc to the server via sftp clients.

Eventually, i think May, I introduced some friends/ family to my media server, and realized I needed to scale up a bit, so I setup the full arr stack with jellyseerr and qBitTorrent and migrated jellyfin to docker.

A few weeks ago, i finally figured out hardware acceleration with my old nvidia graphics card, as it was being a pain in the ass previously. Up to this point, everyone would just connect with my homes external ip and port forwarding.

This brings us to yesterday, my isp, Comcast, had a “planned” outage that they didn’t warn anyone about. Which ended up changing my ip so none of my friends/family could access anything until I figured out what happened. So, I finally decided to setup a ddns with noip, and looked into nginx and reverse proxies. After a few trials and tribulations, people can now access everything on the server without sticking a port on the end of a url/ip. Along the way i also started hosting my own team speak and factorio servers

Now I’m just wondering if there’s anything else that’ll make a huge improvement like everything else mentioned, I don’t think there’s anything else I could even want, except upgrading the actual server hardware with more storage

  • Javi@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Congrats! Out of the usual suspects, (nginx, traefik & caddy), id say nginx has the steepest learning curve, so it’s definitely something to crow about mate! I know professionals in the tech industry that have a hard time with nginx config, so an enthusiast getting it down is a bigger deal than you’re giving yourself credit for.

    I host various services for friends and family; and here are a couple I think will be of particular interest to you:

    Another thing I would strongly suggest doing, is setting up a single sign on Auth server. Something that will allow your friends and family to have one login for anything you setup. Personally I use keycloak. But there are other options like authentik and voidauth that are worth looking at too!

    Congrats again on the progress mate! You’re smashing it so far.

    • guynamedzero@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I’d actually argue that my usage is correct here, it’s probably a regional thing but imo, set up means the verb of setting something up, whereas setup is a noun referring to a specific way that something was set up

      • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Right, and when you said you “finally setup nginx”, that was a verb, and should have been “set up”.