Jellyfin Remote Access with Tailscale | Ethan Madison's website
A few months ago, I set up a Jellyfin media server on my desktop so that I could stream content from my library to my phone in order to watch shows in bed. That was pretty cool, but what if I wasn’t home? I live with some housemates and don’t have access to port forwarding settings on our router and have a dynamic IP address. With exposing the service to the Internet not an easy option, using a VPN was my next thought.
I had previously heard about Tailscale 👁, a mesh VPN network using Wireguard. Since it handles NAT-traversal, is free to use, and BSD-licensed, this seemed like a perfect solution.1
I didn’t see any guides about setting up remote access to Jellyfin using Tailscale or similar, so here’s mine! I’m on Arch Linux, but most steps will be similar regardless of operating system.
This post written with some feedback by the Tailscale team after I participated in a survey, but it is not sponsored by Tailscale.