I’m pretty new to self-hosting in general, so I’m sorry if I’m not using correct terminology or if this is a dumb question.
I did a big archival project last year, and ripped all 700 or so DVDs/Blu-rays I own. Ngl, I had originally planned on just having them all in a big media folder and picking out whatever I wanted to watch that way. Fortunately, I discovered Jellyfin, and went with that instead.
So I bought a mini pc to run Ubuntu server on, and I just installed Jellyfin directly there. Eventually I decided to try hosting a few other services (like Home Assistant and BookLore (R.I.P.)), which I did through Docker.
So I’m wondering, should I be running Jellyfin through Docker as well? Are there advantages to running Jellyfin through Docker as opposed to installed directly on the server? Would transitioning my Jellyfin instance to Docker be a complicated process (bearing in mind that I’m new and dumb)?
Thanks for any assistance.


I prefer to run processes directly on the host system if I can. Jellyfin is well behaved, running as its own user and not hogging RAM, and it doesn’t need dependencies that conflict with other apps/services. So I don’t see a need to add a layer of port/volume/stderr mapping.
I also ran HA and AppDaemon just in Python virtual envs. Glad to share Ansible playbooks if you’re interested.
Ngl, I used an ansible playbook one time and I felt like a fourth grader trying to perform open heart surgery. Again, I am just so very very new and dumb lmao