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.


Contrary to the other poster I prefer Docker over directly on the main OS. For one simple reason, uninstall. I tend to install/uninstall stuff frequently. Sure Jellyfin is great now, but what about next year when something happens and I want to switch to a fork, or emby, or something else? Uninstalling in Linux is a crapshoot. Not too bad if you’re using a package manager, but oftentimes the things I install aren’t in the package manager. Uninstalling binaries, cleaning up directories, removing users and groups, and removing dependancies is a massive pain. Back before docker instead of doing dist upgrades on my ubuntu server, I’d reinstall from scratch just to clean everything up.
With docker, cleanup is a breeze.