I want to expose my services publicly on my own domain name, how would you guys do that?
I have seen people using Cloudflare, but I don’t want to use Cloudflare out of principle. I have also seen stuff on caddy and frp that I’ve done some rough researching.
What do you guys do?
By all means correct me if you know more, but what I tend to see is one or two people here saying that Jellyfin devs don’t recommend exposing it publicly, only to be corrected by looking at the actual documentation. I suspect those cautioning against it are on outdated information and that Jellyfin carries much the same risk as exposing any other service.
I think what the devs are saying is ‘don’t expose Jellyfin to the public in an unsafe manner’. I don’t run Jellyfin, but can confirm what you’ve read here. In that vein, don’t expose anything to the public in an unsafe manner.
There is no safe manner of exposing jellyfin.
Again, I do not run Jellyfin, but what you’re saying seems contradictory to what the devs are implying: here and here. Since I lack the hands on experience, I will leave the issue with the experts.
That first page says exposing it to the Internet is “not recommended”. Putting a reverse proxy in front of it does not meaningfully change the security posture. A malicious request to
http://jellyfin.homelab.com/exploitable-pagewill be sent to jellyfin in effectively the same way, whether through a reverse proxy or not. You would need a WAF set up specifically to look for relevant exploit attempts.https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
Those are some outstanding known vulnerabilities, most of them unfixed. They are not particularly severe, but it shows that thorough security is not a priority for the jellyfin devs.
It says exposing a port directly to the internet is not recommended; do you know of any project that would recommend directly exposing a port? What is meaningfully different here?
Sure, any project designed to be exposed to the Internet. Web servers would be the most obvious.
Probably the number one recommendation I see in self hosting communities is to not open ports directly (other than for a reverse proxy). It seems like a common recommendation no matter the service. To be clear: I am a beginner. I know very little about this, but I’ve spent months learning. I can’t say you’re wrong, but I don’t think you’ve made a convincing argument for me to actually understand why Jellyfin is unsafe to expose to the internet compared to any other service.
You are welcome to expose it at your own risk. Assess you own tolerance for compromise (personal data compromise, becoming part of a botnet, becoming a host for spam or CSAM) and proceed accordingly.