Thalia

A self-hosted media server, written from scratch to be fast where Jellyfin is slow: scanning, browsing, playback start and startup.

One image, one binary. Movies, series, music, photos, ebooks, audiobooks, live TV and channels, each with a browser built for that medium. Plugins are TypeScript. The apps you already use keep working through translation layers: the Jellyfin API for video, OpenSubsonic for music, OPDS for ebooks.

Status

Planning. The architecture is decided ticket by ticket on the Thalia v1 map. The glossary is CONTEXT.md, decisions live in docs/adr.

Run

You need git and Docker with Compose. The image is private: log in to GHCR with a GitHub token that has read:packages.

git clone https://github.com/mia-cx/thalia.git thalia
cd thalia
docker login ghcr.io
docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:3000 and create the admin account in the setup wizard. Inside Thalia, your media lives under /media: put it in ./media, or set THALIA_MEDIA to its folder before docker compose up.

Movie metadata and artwork come from TMDB. Put your TMDB v3 API key, the 32-character one, in .env as TMDB_API_KEY=<key>, or run scripts/tmdb-key-wizard.sh to write it there. Then run docker compose up -d again. Thalia does not use the Read Access Token.

Without access to the image, build it from the clone instead:

docker compose -f compose.yaml -f compose.build.yaml up -d --build

docs/operations.md covers roles, environment variables, health, logs and releases.

License

MCX: MPL 2.0 with network use counted as distribution.

Layout

A Bun workspace with Turborepo. apps/server is the Bun host with the mediums and the first-party providers in-tree. apps/web is the SvelteKit client and admin UI. packages/plugin-api holds the published plugin types. plugins/webhooks is the first-party plugin that ships through the official registry.

Develop

Install dependencies.

bun install

Run the development servers.

bun run dev

Run the tests.

bun test

Build the image from your checkout and start it with Postgres. Set THALIA_HOST_PORT when 3000 is taken on the host.

docker compose -f compose.yaml -f compose.build.yaml up --build

Database and S3 tests skip without a server. Set DATABASE_URL to a test Postgres and TEST_S3_URL to a test S3-compatible server, such as http://<key>:<secret>@127.0.0.1:7070/<bucket>.