I'm so grateful I came across your Youtube post. I've been trying to figure out how to put together a Docker environment with all of the containers you've included, for a couple of months. I was very close to quitting due to all of the problems I've been having; I'm not a programmer. Once I worked through fixing some prior VPN "fixes" I was able to get all of the containers working and healthy. Now I'm working through setting things up with Nginx, Cloudflare for my domain name access, and for the media server. As I have mergerfs and snapraid installed on my Ubuntu server, I was trying to figure out how to set up the directory paths for movies, audiobooks, music, etc. to the shared storage. I have my music and audiobooks there. Thanks for any help!
10 replies
tomspark wrote:
Welcome — getting mergerfs+snapraid+SparkBox healthy as a non-programmer is real work, not a small win. Cleanest path for pointing the media stack at your mergerfs storage is a symlink: sudo mv /opt/sparkbox/data/media /opt/sparkbox/data/media.bak sudo ln -s /mnt/your-mergerfs-path /opt/sparkbox/data/media sudo sparkbox restart media That makes Jellyfin, the arr stack, and Plex (just shipped today) all see the same folder. Inside it, name your subfolders Movies, TV, Music, Audiobooks — those names matter because the arr containers look for them by name. One thing to check first: what's the actual mergerfs mount path on your machine? Run this and paste what you see: mount | grep mergerfs I'll sanity-check the symlink command before you run it.
kiltmann wrote:
Thank you so much for your reply! I went to bed just after, so I am just returning to it. Here is the output: mount | grep mergerfs 1:3 on /mnt/storage type fuse.mergerfs (rw,relatime,userid=0,groupid=0,defaultpermissions,allowother) I cobbled together some old external HDDs which is the reason I used mergerfs, snapraid. Is there a better way than using mergerfs/snapraid for local storage? Additionally, I need to buy a bigger drive due to the way mergerfs works but they are soooo expensive now. Separately, some ideas to include in the next iteration could be: beets (with musicbrainz?), automatic ripping machine, Make MKV, and Handbrake. I try not to ask a lot of questions since I don't want to annoy people for things that are probably very simple. I try to read documentation, ask deepwiki or other ai platforms, look online. Once I think I understand things, I mess something up and get confused.
tomspark wrote:
Here's the symlink with your real path: sudo mv /opt/sparkbox/data/media /opt/sparkbox/data/media.bak sudo ln -s /mnt/storage /opt/sparkbox/data/media sudo sparkbox restart media Then make Movies / TV / Music / Audiobooks subfolders inside /mnt/storage. On mergerfs+snapraid: for a pile of mismatched old drives that's genuinely the right tool — it's the exact use case it was built for. The matched-drive alternatives (ZFS/btrfs RAID) would be worse for you, not better. You made a good call; don't second-guess it. Snapraid parity on top is solid for media you can re-acquire if a disk dies. beets/ARM/MakeMKV/Handbrake — good calls, logging them. No timing promises (heads-down on core stability during beta) but ripping/tagging is a known gap. And ask away — it's a beta, questions are the whole point. Not annoying anyone.
tomspark wrote:
Mergerfs + snapraid is fine for what you're doing — the drive cost is the real pain, not the setup. For the symlink: sudo ln -s /mnt/storage /opt/sparkbox/data/media and you're done (no move needed since the mount path is straightforward). On the feature ideas — beets, MakeMKV, Handbrake are solid requests. Automatic Ripping Machine is more niche. I've got them noted. Don't worry about asking questions — that's what the forum is for, and you're clearly reading docs and trying things first, which is the right approach.
kiltmann wrote:
Hello, Having some problems with Navidrome and Audiobookshelf not seeing my media. I made the symlink Radar and Sonar are able to put media into /mnt/storage on my server, and I can stream from Jellyfin so the link seems to work. Navidrome and Audiobookshelf won't seem to access the music or audiobooks folders. I've changed the names from Music to music, Audiobooks to audiobooks. Still can't get the to scan the folders. Thanks for any help!
tomspark wrote:
Good news, your symlink's working — that's exactly why Jellyfin sees everything. The catch: in SparkBox, music and audiobooks live in their own folders, separate from movies and TV, so your one symlink only covered the media folder. Navidrome reads /opt/sparkbox/data/music and Audiobookshelf reads /opt/sparkbox/data/audiobooks — both sit next to the media folder, not inside it. Point those two at your storage as well: sudo ln -s /mnt/storage/music /opt/sparkbox/data/music sudo ln -s /mnt/storage/audiobooks /opt/sparkbox/data/audiobooks Then sudo sparkbox restart. Navidrome rescans on its own within an hour, or hit the manual scan in its settings to see your music right away.
kiltmann wrote:
Thank you!
tomspark wrote:
You're welcome! Once Navidrome is pointed at /opt/sparkbox/data/music and Audiobookshelf at /opt/sparkbox/data/audiobooks, hit the library-scan button in each app — they only pick up new folders on a scan, so that's usually the last missing step. Shout if anything's still hiding after that.
kiltmann wrote:
All working and synced!
tomspark wrote:
That's the whole stack running end to end — nicely done getting there as a first-timer. Enjoy it!