Opening jellyfin up publicly is kind of asking for trouble if you ask me. I haven't done so myself, but seen enough on this community and elsewhere to know that it's probably not a good idea.

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 I suspect those cautioning against it are on outdated information and that Jellyfin carries much the same risk as exposing any other service.

but what I tend to see is one or two people here saying that Jellyfin devs don’t recommend exposing it publicly

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-page will 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.

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.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve done. You still haven’t shown me why it’s unsafe. If you can’t, that’s fine. At some threshold or another, nothing is secure. The one thing I know for sure is that that first page, that says it doesn’t recommend exposing a port, does not say what you said it does.

It sounds to me like you just have a higher risk tolerance, and if you accept that, that’s okay.

You're probably misunderstanding what netbird does (unless I'm the one misunderstanding things?).

Netbird subnet is equivalent to a tailscale tailnet (for all practical purposes; they even both use wireguard and hole-punching underneath). Netbird is not a reverse proxy (which I feel is what you think based on your comment).

While Netbird is generally just one of the many alternatives to Tailscale, they also do have a Reverse Proxy feature that allows access without a Netbird client. Haven’t tested it yet, seems to be in beta.

docs.netbird.io/manage/reverse-proxy

The reverse Proxy is exactly what I use (in addition to the VPN, but I’m the only one that uses that in my group of cohorts)

Its been in Beta for a but now, but its worked perfectly for me the entire time

same

I do this albeit with Tailscale. Netbird/Tailscale would act as a node of your VPN and you can configure reverse proxy routes (via tailscale serve or Netbird’s equivalent) from the VPS edge to the homelab. You can even do SNI passthrough and have TLS terminated at your home, if you want, though this can be a bit slower

Alternatively you can even expose stuff via their servers. Tailscale Inc calls this service Funnels, and Netbird should have similar offerings. It’s kinda like Tunnels but you gotta use their domains, so a VPS acts greater as a dedicated entrypoint.

Lastly yes you’d be exposing the service to the general public internet, so some basic security is needed. Netbird has a Crowdsec module integration, might wanna look at that one and set up rules/detections. Consider putting extra auth in front of Jellyfin, use Authelia or something with an auth screen. And only expose the stuff you need, not your internal dashboard or whatever admin UI.

Yup! They can either connect to your Netbird meshnet (ie, similar a tailnet) or you can reverse proxy it out to the internet (no tailnet needed)

I saw a couple comments below concerned about security, one of the nice things about Netbird is that they have reverse proxy auth built in if you want. Some stuff (Navidrome or VoidAuth for instance) only has geolocation locked down (US only) but other things that I’m either more concerned about or don’t necessarily trust being open (Paperless or Komodo for instance) have Netbird Auth and VoidAuth as sign in options before it will let me open the page. Its worked flawlessly so far, and has kept my sanity intact because I wanted some stuff publically accessible without it being OPEN.

As far as being hammer fucked, it has CrowdSec and Geolocation lockdowns so you can set it to only accept traffic from ONE location and the Crowdsec also catches everything.