I am setting up Jellyfin Media Server on new installation of Fedora 35.

Jellyfin requires access to library folders which hold movies, TV shows etc.

In the Jellyfin web GUI it states:

For Linux on Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, or Ubuntu, you must grant the service user at least read access to your storage locations.

I set up library folders in /home/my_user/jellyfin and have changed owner to jellyfin user and jellyfin group but JF tells me path not found.

I then set the library folders up in /srv directory, JF accepts this and the media server will stream to my TV properly.

Is it recommended (security) to run library folders from a root folder.....should I just leave it this way?

Can anyone point me in the right direction to correct for JF not seeing folders in my user directory?

Thank you.

JF can't get to a directory under your home directory unless it can read your home directory.

You could put all the media in a directory owned by JF and give yourself group access rights

According to FHS, /srv/jellyfin or /usr/local/share/jellyfin seem to be appropriate places for this sort of things.

smallpond:

As stated in OP, owner of library folders I attempted to use was changed to jellyfin, did not work.

shruggy:

I am feeling better about using /srv thanks. I just was not sure about security when using a directory owned as root for these library files.

What was said was that the user running the service needed access to your home directory.
If you do 'ls -l /home' and look at your home directory permissions you probably see it has permissions such as 'drwxr-x---.' and that needs to be 'drwxr-xr-x.'

To understand permissions, it is really simple. The user trying to access a directory falls into 1 of 3 groups. Owner (also known as User), Group, and Other. That means that if the user under which jellyfin is running (jellyfin) is seen (from your users perspective) as not having either ownership or group membership then it is Other and you have to grant the Other user permissions r-x to pass through every level of the directory tree from the root (/) to the library in order to read those files. Any single level that blocks it will prevent access to everything below.

OK, thanks for clarification, good learning for me. It is all simple when you know it of course.

Initially I put library folders in /home/my_user/Videos directory and gave permissions to Videos not home.

If library folders are in a /home directory does that mean my media server will lose access to them when computer logs out?

Maybe it's better for them to be in /srv after all?

No, as long as the system is up and the server is running it will have access to the library directory. It does not depend upon the user being logged in.

Using /srv with the proper permissions is quite acceptable as well.