I installed Jellyfin on an iMac running Fedora 39/Gnome and it was running more or less without any issues. However, I wanted to have the iMac on a VPN which would prevent accessing content indexed by Jellyfin elsewhere. So I installed Ubuntu on an old Mac Mini that I had, planning to make it a NAS box as well as host Jellyfin. The install there did not go well at all, I got the error “The server is expected to host the web client, but the provided content directory is either invalid or empty.”

I found a post on github where a user created the directory listed in the error and then copied from /usr/share/jellyfin/web/ and when I did that the startup went further but then it threw the error “Kestrel failed to start! This is most likely due to an invalid address or port bind - correct your bind configuration in network.xml and try again.”

I could not find a clear answer as to where the “network.xml” file is located, and I couldn’t find any files that seemed to have the contents that were expected in network.xml. I put that aside for another day, considering a different distro if there are any others that are better with jellyfin than Ubuntu.

Today I was going to watch something that had been working on the Fedora box, and it would not play. I checked systemctl and jellyfin was not running. I tried launching it from the terminal and I got the same “server is expected to host the web client” error I had before.

Has anyone else run into these issues? Is there any better documentation out there than what is on the jellyfin site? Any help is much appreciated.