Methods for requesting documentation changes?

[kaitco]

A common question that often comes up for Jellyfin is accessing Jellyfin securely from outside a home network. 

The most commonly recommended resource for achieving this is through a reverse proxy, like Caddy. That said, it does not appear that any of the documentation includes a key piece of information about reverse proxies which is port forwarding the port for the proxy.

At neither here nor here, is there any mention that a user needs to port forward Caddy's port (2019), as well as the 80 and 443 ports.

I spent over a month trying to get secure remote access to Jellyfin working and it turned out that the key issues were the missing Caddy port forwarding and then a firewall exception. I suspect that the reason remote Jellyfin access question comes up so frequently is because the documentation does not include key elements like port forwarding the proxy's port, as well as some plain "ELI5" descriptions of what actions to take.

So, what would be the best place to submit a change to the documentation?

[Deleted User]

the guide from june seems to cover what you are talking about being missing

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-access-your...with-caddy

[kaitco]

The issue, it seems, is that the forum items must not appear high in basic search rankings, so it can be easily missed, but also that that guide still does not specify the needed Caddy port.

So if your Jellyfin (and soon, Caddy) host is on your LAN IP of 192.168.1.4, you would forward external ports :80 and :443 to internal 192.168.1.4:80 and 192.168.1.4:443, respectively. The external and internal ports don't have to match. For example, you could have Caddy bind to higher ports like 9080 and 9443 and forward from :80/:443 to :9080/:9443 instead. This can be useful if you don't want to bind to low ports on your Jellyfin/Caddy host.

The above doesn't specify that port 2019 is needed, and as port forwarding is not normally performed outside of gaming communities that host servers, the above also isn't in a simple format that just tells a base user what to do.

There's also my main question which is updating the guides that appear on the main Jellyfin site. Before descending into numerous searches, a user would review the linked documentation first, and that is what needs to be updated. So, how would we get those guides updated?

[TheDreadPirate]

Why does port 2019 need to be forwarded? From the docs I'm reading, that is for MANAGING Caddy. Which you definitely don't want openly accessible to the Internet.

[mcarlton00]

Disclaimer: I've never used caddy and use nginx as my reverse proxy.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding or what, but I don't see any reference to port 2019 in caddy documentation, or the linked forum tutorial.  As far as I'm aware, it's not needed at all.  You configure caddy via the cli and it does it's thing, I don't know what another port would be required for.  The only reference I see to it is on this page, where it talks about uploading a new config: https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/caddyfile

> curl localhost:2019/load \
-H "Content-Type: text/caddyfile" \
--data-binary @Caddyfile

Which seems to indicate that this is an admin endpoint for non docker installs, in which case I would strongly suggest you do not ever open that port to the world.

If you're positive that the docs are incorrect, you can submit a change request yourself via git here: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin.org...g/caddy.md

However, given that the developer of caddy has contributed to those docs and made no mention of it, I'm skeptical that it's actually required.

[kaitco]

The reason why I'm relatively certain that it's required is that I was never able to get caddy to connect correctly without it. I'd even tested both with and without Port 2019. When following all other steps to the letter, I always ended up with a circular error where caddy couldn't connect and would wait some time before trying again.

If folks feel it is not necessary, then I won't add it, but thank you for the link to the change request for the future.