It might be an ownership or access issue. Try explicitly enabling read/write access to the drive with chmod.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
62 points (98.4% liked)
Selfhosted
62993 readers
1494 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil.
-
No spam.
-
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
-
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
-
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah this, 99% of the cases its permissions not being right.
And make sure the directory and internal files are owned by the jellyfin user and group. chown -R jellyfin:jellyfin DIRECTORY fixed so many of my issues
Rad. I will try this. Thank you!
If your media stack is containerized with docker (no idea how you installed it), you need to go into your docker compose file and grant the container access to your drive.
Are you on Windows or Linux? If Linux, is jellyfin installed on docker or from your package manager? The drive is mounted right?
Linux. Jellyfin was installed via package manager. I'm to dumb for docker. Yes, the drive is mounted.
Check permissions of the external drive, and set owner to jellyfin group. Give rw permissions to that group/drive. I went through similar with my external drives. It was a permissions issue.
Read permissions should be enough, I've got mine in a freebsd jail with the media dataset mounted into it read only.
I'd do read/write and enable nfo files alongside the media files.
Then I'd use an admin account for admin stuff and a regular user without any edit permissions.
Yeah I reread the part where you said you installed Linux lol. On top of checking permissions also check user ownership of the media. I believe a normal jellyfin install uses your user rather than it's own system user
I will do that! I asked this question right before I went on a work trip, which was a dumb move, but I'll do that. Thanks for the advice!
Installing Linux and running a service is hard and if you're only going to be running Jellyfin then most people would say that's the best way to go (and probably much much harder than just doing a docker-compose up command which is pretty much what I did). Well done on getting it going. I've been running it a few weeks at home, yesterday I got to test it out remotely, I was stunned that even with my rubbish home internet, it ran flawlessly!
Sounds like the server is online before the drive is mounted?
Depends on how you connected it.
Anyway: Welcome to the party and happy collecting :)
Do you have access to external drive files with your Linux user? Can you read a modify files? If so, surely it is a file permission issue.
If you're on docker:
Could be that the path to the mounted disk isn't exposed. (Test: Go into docker container with bash and try listing the movies and try doing a cat textfile.txt to check read access)
Could be that even though the path is exposed the media is not writable. (Test: Go into docker container and do a touch command and see if file pops up). Not sure if relevant but is relevant for Sonarr.
Not mounted?
It could have been mounted once but is not anymore. Not sure how Sparky works but on Fedora Bazzite I had to add fstab line to auto mount the drive on power up.
Generally the rule is that if Jellyfin can see and read the files it can play them and will auto add if the path is configured.
Upgrade to docker when you can. It's not as hard as you think. And it's an extra skill. If you can handle Linux you can handle docker