Drives on a headless Jellyfin box ran hot 24/7: NAS-class drives (WD Red, IronWolf) ship with no idle timer at all. v0.1.2 stopped tuistream from keeping them awake; this makes them actually go to sleep. Spin-down is a DEFAULT, not a feature: when the inventory shows spinning media drives, the TUI silently installs/syncs the mechanism and flashes what it did. [s] on Setup is the opt-OUT, remembered via /etc/tuistream/spindown-off so the default never fights the user. The mechanism is a tiny systemd service (tuistream --spindown-watch) that samples /proc/diskstats and issues `hdparm -y` to any target drive idle past 3 minutes. We deliberately do NOT use the drive's own standby timer (hdparm -S): the 10TB helium WD Reds advertise it and then ignore it — verified on real hardware (fresh -S 36, zero I/O, four minutes, still active/idle). Forcing standby from outside works on everything. An rc shipped the udev+hdparm -S approach; the plans clean its rule up. Safety: targets are spinning (sysfs rotational), top-level, real disks, never a system disk — same classifier the rest of Setup trusts. The watcher's own probes can't disturb drives: /proc/diskstats and sysfs are kernel memory, and hdparm -C (CHECK POWER MODE) doesn't wake or reset anything. The unit's ExecStart points at the running binary and the auto-sync rewrites it when the content goes stale (e.g. binary moved from a dev path to /usr/local/bin). hdparm joins the dependency pre-flight. Verified end-to-end on moviebox (2x WD Red 10TB SATA + IronWolf 10TB USB): auto-applied on launch, all three drives reached standby after 3 idle minutes, Monitor shows them as "asleep" without waking them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
5.7 KiB
TUISTREAM (tuistream)
A terminal UI for setting up and running a headless Jellyfin media server on Arch / Omarchy — over SSH, with no desktop environment. It installs Jellyfin, attaches and mounts media drives (single disks or btrfs RAID pools), opens the firewall, and shows a live health monitor, all without dropping you to a shell or switching terminals mid-task.
TUISTREAM is an independent setup/management tool for Jellyfin. It is not affiliated with the Jellyfin project; "Jellyfin" is used here descriptively.
Features
- Setup — install / uninstall Jellyfin, open or close the firewall ports, copy the server's web address to your clipboard (works over SSH + tmux), and move Jellyfin's library storage onto a media drive.
- Drive spin-down by default — spinning media drives are automatically put
to sleep after 3 idle minutes (cooler, quieter) by a tiny background watcher
that survives reboots — and works even on NAS drives that ignore their own
firmware idle timer (looking at you, WD Red). System drives are never
touched;
sopts out if you want 24/7 spinning. - Add media drive — attach a spare disk or partition: keep its existing
filesystem or format it (btrfs / ext4 / xfs), or combine 2+ disks into a
btrfs RAID pool (1 / 0 / 5 / 10). The boot drive is never offered — the
classifier follows every candidate down through LUKS / LVM / RAID to its
physical disk and refuses anything hosting
/,/boot, or swap. - Import an existing btrfs pool — re-attach a multi-device pool from a previous setup non-destructively (mounts it as-is; never formats).
- Safe with existing media — keeping a filesystem previews what's on it, skips creating starter folders when it already has content, and grants Jellyfin read access recursively so existing media is actually visible to the scanner.
- Manage — copy media in from an external drive (with a file picker), mount / eject drives, and rename or delete files, each behind a confirmation.
- Monitor — per-core CPU, load / memory / uptime, per-mount capacity, btrfs pool error counters, and per-disk SMART health — for a box you only reach over SSH.
- Single static binary; missing tools (btrfs-progs, xfsprogs, acl, …) are installed on first launch.
Install
One line, nothing to clone:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/28allday/TUISTREAM/main/install.sh | bash
This installs the right binary for your architecture into /usr/local/bin
(using sudo if needed) so both tuistream and sudo tuistream resolve. Pin a
version with TUISTREAM_VERSION=v0.1.0, or change the prefix with PREFIX=/opt.
TUISTREAM installs to a system path on purpose: it's a root-by-design tool
(installs Jellyfin, edits /etc/fstab, mounts drives), so it must be on the sudo
secure_path — ~/.local/bin is not.
Usage
sudo tuistream # full TUI
tuistream --read-only # inventory views only, no root, no actions
Run with sudo, it acts on behalf of the real user behind the sudo invocation
($SUDO_USER): media drives mount under /media/<user>/ and its Omarchy theme
is used. tab / shift+tab switch tabs, r refreshes, q quits; each tab
shows its key bar at the bottom.
Getting started
A first-run, from an empty box to a working server — all from the Setup tab
(sudo tuistream):
- Install Jellyfin — press
iand confirm. TUISTREAM pulls Jellyfin from the official Arch repo and starts the service. - Attach storage for your media:
- A spare disk → press
a(add drive), pick it, choose Keep existing filesystem or format it, and name it. It mounts at/media/<user>/<name>. - A multi-disk btrfs pool from a previous setup → press
p(import pool) to re-attach it untouched. (ponly shows when such a pool is present.) - On a fresh drive, TUISTREAM seeds library folders for you under
<mount>/JellyfinMedia/:Movies,Shows,Music,Books,Home Videos,Music Videos. Copy your media into these (the Manage tab'sccan copy in from an external drive).
- A spare disk → press
- Open the firewall — press
fso other devices on your LAN can reach the server (ports8096/tcpweb UI and7359/udpdiscovery). - Open the web UI — press
yto copy the server's address (http://<host>:8096) to your clipboard, even over SSH, then open it in a browser on any LAN device. - Create your libraries in Jellyfin — in the web UI's first-run wizard, add
a library for each type and point it at the matching folder under
/media/<user>/<name>/JellyfinMedia/(e.g. Movies →…/JellyfinMedia/Movies). The folder names already match Jellyfin's content types.
Optional: press j to move Jellyfin's own library database and metadata off the
OS drive onto a media drive (handy on a small boot SSD).
Note on drive spin-down: when TUISTREAM sees spinning media drives it
automatically installs a small watcher service that spins them down after 3
idle minutes, so they don't run hot 24/7. (It watches actual disk I/O rather
than trusting the drive's own idle timer, which many NAS drives silently
ignore.) The first play after a sleep takes a few seconds while the drives
wake. Press s to opt out — TUISTREAM remembers and won't re-apply the
default.
Build from source
Needs Go 1.26+.
git clone https://github.com/28allday/TUISTREAM
cd TUISTREAM
./install.sh # builds, then installs to /usr/local/bin
License
MIT — see LICENSE. TUISTREAM runs Jellyfin (GPL-2.0) as a separate process; it does not bundle or link it. The terminal UI is built on the Charm libraries (MIT).