Selfhosted

You can do a reverse proxy + authelia (or other auth service). It's still more risky than a VPN IMO, buts wayyyy better than some of the other options in this thread

The biggest problem with that Jellyfin to this day is that you can’t.

Seems like every new open source selfhosted app implements OIDC compatibility, but for some reason, I can only assume is technical debt, Jellyfin hasn’t.

To be totally honest I'm not sure you can harden jellyfin enough for public Internet exposure without also breaking basic functionality of the platform.

This is why everyone is always pushing so hard for a VPN/Tailnet of some kind. The public internet is a bit to much of a wild west to be exposing arbitrary services to it unless you really know what you're doing.

Put Jellyfin and a reverse proxy in an isolated vlan or DMZ, with no ability to reach into your lan at all and everyone connects in the same way. Its just movies, thats all you lose if it gets hacked. Set up some monitoring too in case it becomes a botnet node so you can destroy it and start over.

I'm kinda disappointed with this thread, I'm in a similar position to OP, but all the responses are just like "use a reverse proxy and make your URL hard to guess" and other measures which are not very secure. \

It seems like that's about as good as you can get at the moment, because the mobile apps barf if you try to add in auth in front of the reverse proxy, but a lot of people seem to be providing this advice like it's good enough rather than as good as you can get.

My use cases are:

• Connect from multiple devices on the same home network (with the application)
• Connect from a phone device on the internet (with the application)
• Connect from some PC's and devices on the internet (with the application and from web browser)

For home networked devices, I don't care about security that much. I try to lock it down on the router level and by using VLANs for less secure devices. I connect via IP directly (or .local domain).

Jellyfin runs under its own user with read access to a media library.

For devices on the internet, I have jellyfin exposed on a specific url path of my domain - through a reverse proxy all through 443. A bit of security through obscurity here. I'm proxied through cloudflare on the DNS side with very restrictive IP rules.
I think this is enough for the security flaws jellyfin does have. I'd sleep better at night if it had client certificate support, but Its not a big deal imo. If security flaws allowing remote code execution are found, I'll shut it down and allow access through wireguard only and lose access from some devices on the internet where I cant use VPNs. Not a bit deal either.

Cloudflare. Just make sure to disable caching

If client certificates and basic auth is not supported by jellyfin:

• reverse proxy
• strong random subdomain
• wildcard certificate
• tls1.3 only
• doh/dot only

1-3 make random scanners unable to find your service, 4&5 even hide it from your ISP. Dot/doh service will still know your subdomain, so be your own dot/doh ! :D

As others have mentioned, a reverse proxy, like nginx or caddy. These are web servers, so you need to configure it or an app that runs in it. May I shill: Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM).

A reverse proxy is what you are looking for. I recommend Caddy.

You’ll also need a domain, but they can be had for very cheap.

Another way:

Expose using caddy. Use basic auth for the web UI only. This exempts the Jellyfin app clients from basic auth that they don’t support but requires it before anyone even gets to the Jellyfin UI. This obfuscates the fact that your endpoint is even a Jellyfin end point.

Run the jellyfin in a container that only has read privileges to the videos ( make sure you can't get out to your whole NAS from there), put that behind a Cloudflaired tunnel.

It's not technically secure, but if they can't get a foothold in your network and the only thing they can access is your video catalog, that's a reasonable amount of risk.