SparkBox patches — Tue Sep 22, 2026
Posted by Chris
SparkBox releases shipped on Tue Sep 22, 2026 (UTC), in order, newest at the bottom. This thread is updated as releases land during the day. Update from the SparkBox dashboard, or run sudo sparkbox upgrade on your SparkBox host. Legend boxes get every release the day it ships; free boxes get it after it has run there for a week. If a problem remains after updating, submit a private support ticket or reply below with the app name, what you expected, and what happened instead. Earlier days: Mon Sep 21, 2026 v1.6.768 — The Jellyfin card on your home page shows your library again - The Jellyfin tile on the home page showed an error instead of what is playing now and how many films and shows you have. The home page was asking Jellyfin for that information at an address Jellyfin stopped answering on when it moved to version 12, which is the version SparkBox installs, so the answer came back as "not found" on every box. Because a "not found" reply looks a lot like a rejected password, this was easy to mistake for a Jellyfin sign-in problem — it was not, and resetting your Jellyfin admin password would not have helped. The home page now asks at the address Jellyfin actually answers on, and the card fills in again the next time your box regenerates its home page. - The assistant now explains what changed in three more releases in plain language instead of showing a placeholder. - Tom AI's retrieval check now measures how well it finds the right article, instead of accidentally measuring the separate grader that scores the answers. v1.6.769 — Sharing a chat to the forum keeps the part that says what is still broken - When you shared a Tom AI chat to the forum, the post was built from your question, Tom's answer and a "What I still need help with" section — but the whole thing was then cut to a fixed length from the top. If you had pasted a long terminal output into the chat, that paste used up the entire post and the section where you say what is still wrong was dropped before you ever saw it, so your post arrived asking nothing and nobody could help. The post is now budgeted: the "What I still need help with" section always survives, and your question and Tom's answer are each shortened on their own so both stay readable. The full conversation still goes to Tom privately, as before. - A shared chat that started with pasted terminal output used to be titled with your command prompt, so nobody browsing the forum could tell what the post was about. The title is now taken from the first line where you are actually describing the problem. - The assistant now explains what changed in three more releases in plain language instead of showing a placeholder. v1.6.770 — A box that reports an app in trouble gets looked at again - When your box reported that one of its apps was in a bad state, our own fleet diagnosis quietly skipped the report instead of reading it: it expected the troubled apps as a list of names, while every box sends a count and the app details beside it. So the reports that exist precisely to get a struggling box noticed were the ones being passed over. Those reports are now read and diagnosed, which means a box that keeps having trouble with the same app is spotted and fixed sooner. Nothing your box sends has changed, and nothing new is collected. - The assistant now explains what changed in three more releases in plain language instead of showing a placeholder. v1.6.771 — Private apps tell you how to open them instead of handing you an SSH command - Shelfarr, CoolerControl and Stable Diffusion are deliberately kept off your network: whoever opens them first becomes their owner, so SparkBox binds them to the box itself. Their cards told you to reach them through the Access picker, but the picker was never switched on for them, so clicking the tile handed you an SSH tunnel command instead — and on a UGREEN NAS that command cannot work, because UGOS ships SSH with port forwarding turned off. All three now offer the Access picker: click choose access on the card and pick a private Tailscale link or a domain behind the proxy. Shelfarr's guide also advertised your box's IP and port 5056, an address that has never answered since the app was made private; it now describes how the app is actually opened. v1.6.772 — The media widget finds Jellyfin again after a reinstall - Your box's media widget asks Jellyfin what is playing and what was recently added, and it needs Jellyfin's access key to do that. It was looking for that key in a file that SparkBox has never written — the key is actually saved alongside the Jellyfin admin password the box generates for you. On most boxes it got the key a second way, from Seerr, so nothing looked wrong; but on a box where Seerr had no key — a fresh install over media you already had, or a Seerr sign-in that was never finished — the widget had no key at all and simply could not reach Jellyfin. It now reads the key from the file the box really writes, so the widget works on those boxes too. Your Jellyfin password and data are untouched. v1.6.773 — SABnzbd opens through a Cloudflare Tunnel address - If you publish apps on your own domain with a Cloudflare Tunnel, SABnzbd would answer "Access denied - Hostname verification failed" on that address while the same app opened fine on your home network. SABnzbd only accepts addresses it has been told about, and the list of addresses you publish lives in your Cloudflare account, so your box had no way to learn them. The Cloudflare Tunnel app now has a box where you list the addresses you published, and SparkBox passes them on. Fill it in, run an update, and the tunnel address works. v1.6.774 — The installer tells you when your big drive is about to go unused - SparkBox keeps everything — media, photos, backups — in one data folder, and it does not pick a drive for you. On anything that is not a NAS appliance that folder defaults to the system disk, and if you had already added a bigger drive for exactly this, nothing said so: the drive sat empty while your library filled the disk the operating system lives on. The installer now looks at what you actually have mounted, and when a larger drive is there it names it, gives its size, and prints the one line to re-run with so your data lands on it. A box with a single drive is left alone, and NAS and network-share advice is unchanged. v1.6.775 — Play Tom Spark’s Fleet from your dashboard - Every SparkBox now has a Play Fleet link and a home card for Tom Spark’s Fleet, the free online space game. Open it in a new tab to mine, trade, and explore with other pilots. Available on free and supporter boxes in every dashboard version, with no app installation needed. v1.6.776 — You can type the Cloudflare tunnel token into Settings again - The box asks for your Cloudflare tunnel token only while you are switching the app on. After that, the Cloudflare Tunnel Token field in Settings was greyed out with a “Don’t change” label, so anyone who pasted the wrong token, or skipped it, had no way back to it without a command line. The same lock sat on the other credentials our guides send you to — the Usenet provider password, the VPN password, the Grafana and PhotoPrism admin passwords. Those fields are typable again, they still carry a warning badge, and saving a new tunnel token now restarts the connector for you so the card turns healthy on its own. v1.6.777 — Restart buttons work again, the Media card is back, and Tom AI can fix things for you - Restart buttons and settings that restart an app work again. Since July, pressing Restart on an app, saving a new VPN, changing a setting that rebuilds an app, or resetting an app password in Settings → Passwords often didn't actually happen — a safety check quietly refused it in the background. They now run the same way updates do, and if one fails the dashboard (or Tom AI) tells you instead of acting as if it worked. - The Media card on your home page works again. The newer Jellyfin that SparkBox installs stopped accepting the way the card sent its access key, so Now Playing, Recently Added, Continue Watching and your library counts were empty on most boxes. They're back. - The checkup no longer says your Jellyfin password is wrong when it isn't. It was introducing itself to Jellyfin in an old way the Jellyfin version we install turns away before it even looks at the password. A genuinely out-of-date password is still caught. The same fix lets the checkup read Jellyfin's hardware-transcoding setting on boxes with a graphics card. - When something was wrong, the Home banner said "1 service needs attention" and pointed you at a page of thirty-odd apps to find it yourself. It now names the app — and the Apps page card names it too, instead of saying "1 service unhealthy" over a list where every service still had a green dot. An app that is running but failing its own health check no longer shows green anywhere. - The Security page tells you in one line whether you need to do anything. Most of the time it says "Nothing you need to do": the known issues it finds are inside each app's own software, their makers fix them, and SparkBox brings those updates to you. You only see a to-do — and a number on the Security tab — when there is something you can actually do, like pressing Update for an app whose new version is ready. - Tom AI can now do the fix instead of describing it. It can press your dashboard's own fix buttons (like the Media card's "Clean up" for leftover downloads) and offer approved repairs when a check shows a problem — restarting an app that is down, fixing a Portainer or database login, refreshing the VPN server list, or giving an app that keeps running out of memory more room. You approve every one, and Tom AI re-checks your apps before saying anything is fixed. - Ask Tom AI to: reset an app's password (the new one goes to Settings → Passwords, never into the chat), install an app from the catalog after checking your box has room, add someone to your Jellyfin with a one-time invite or a new login, move your VPN to another country or city, show what is filling your disk and clean up only safe things, back up now or tell you when the last backup ran, restore a backup (it takes a fresh backup first), request a movie or show through your own Seerr, or start an app or SparkBox update. Anything that changes your box asks you first; deleting or restoring also asks for your dashboard password. - New command sudo sparkbox set-memory <app <size gives an app that keeps running out of memory more room and restarts only that app; sudo sparkbox set-memory <app default puts it back. The checkup now prints the exact line to run for each app it saw run out of memory. - Tunarr sets itself up: it connects to your Jellyfin (and Plex, if it's signed in), switches on your Movies and TV libraries, and uses your graphics chip for encoding when your box has one SparkBox already uses for Jellyfin. Go straight to Channels and build one. - More apps connect themselves: SABnzbd is now linked to Lidarr and Chaptarr the way it already was to Sonarr and Radarr, Unpackerr picks up your Sonarr and Radarr keys without you pasting them, and Chaptarr gets its Books and Audiobooks folders again (its last update had quietly stopped that). Connections you set up yourself are left alone. - When support proposes a database-login repair on your ticket and you approve it, it now actually runs — it used to stop at a question nobody could answer and still report that it had finished. - Homarr is no longer offered — SparkBox's own dashboard already puts every app on one page. If your box already runs Homarr, nothing changes: it keeps running and updating until you remove it. - Tom Spark's Fleet is a card you can remove. The banner and nav links from the last release became one compact Home card: link your pilot once with a code from the game and it shows your ship, credits, kills, rescues and where you are parked. Don't play? Click Remove card and it is gone from every dashboard on your box, and you can add it back any time from Customize or Settings.