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Aurora

Aurora is a cinematic web frontend for Jellyfin. It runs as one Docker container alongside your existing server, reads your libraries over the Jellyfin API, and reports playback progress back to Jellyfin. It keeps Jellyfin as the source of truth and never duplicates your data.

Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • Jellyfin-powered home screen with featured, continue watching, favorites, and recommendation rails
  • Embedded playback with progress sync back to Jellyfin
  • Rich title detail views with cast, related titles, and series episode context
  • Movie and series library pages with genre browsing, sorting, and pagination
  • My List / Favorites workflow backed by Jellyfin favorites
  • Multi-user profiles with a Netflix-style profile picker for shared households
  • Optional required sign-in with per-user Jellyfin sessions, so playback and watch progress are attributed to the right account
  • Admin dashboard for managing users, parental controls, libraries, and active sessions
  • TV mode with larger text and remote-friendly navigation, plus light/dark themes and translations (English, Dutch)
  • Local-first onboarding backed by SQLite so self-hosting doesn’t require an external database
  • PWA and Capacitor wrappers for installable web, Android, and iOS builds

Stack

Section titled “Stack”

Running with Docker

Section titled “Running with Docker”

The recommended way to self-host Aurora:

Terminal window
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 \
  -v aurora-data:/data \
  getcoral/aurora:latest

Open http://localhost:3000 and complete the onboarding flow once — Aurora persists the Jellyfin connection in /data/aurora.sqlite. Alternatively, skip onboarding by passing the Jellyfin environment variables below.

Aurora serves on port 3000 and exposes /healthz, which returns non-200 until the server is ready — useful as a Docker healthcheck.

For a full stack with Jellyfin, Tide and Librarian alongside it, see Running a stack with Docker Compose.

Local Development

Section titled “Local Development”

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • Node.js 24 LTS (Node 22.5+ is the hard floor — this module uses the built-in node:sqlite module, which does not exist on Node 18 or 20)
  • pnpm
  • A running Jellyfin server

Setup

Section titled “Setup”
Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/Get-Coral/aurora.git
cd aurora
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env   # optional: skips the in-app setup flow
pnpm dev

Aurora will be available at http://localhost:3000.

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”

All configuration can be done through the in-app setup and settings screens; environment variables are optional overrides.

VariablePurpose
JELLYFIN_URLJellyfin server URL
JELLYFIN_API_KEYJellyfin API key
JELLYFIN_USER_IDUUID of the primary Jellyfin user
JELLYFIN_USERNAME / JELLYFIN_PASSWORDUsed for the playback session when sign-in is not required
AURORA_REQUIRE_LOGINtrue forces required sign-in and locks the toggle
AURORA_MULTI_USERtrue forces multi-user profiles and locks the toggle
AURORA_DATA_DIRWhere the local SQLite database lives (default ./data)
HOSTInterface the server binds to (default 0.0.0.0)
PORTPort the server listens on (default 3000)
AURORA_STREAM_TOKEN_SECRETSigning secret for AirPlay/Cast stream URLs. Generated and stored automatically if unset — set it to keep URLs valid across data directories. Changing it invalidates every stream URL already handed to a TV
AURORA_DISABLE_SPA_PRERENDERBuild-time. Skips SPA prerendering; the published image sets it

AURORA_APP_URL is a build-time variable for the Capacitor native shells only (capacitor.config.ts); it has no effect on the server.

aurora/.env.example still lists PLEX_URL and PLEX_TOKEN. Nothing reads them — they are leftovers from a dropped experiment, and setting them does nothing.

User Profiles & Sign-In

Section titled “User Profiles & Sign-In”

Aurora supports shared households out of the box:

  • Profiles: enable multi-user mode in Settings → User profiles (or AURORA_MULTI_USER=true). Everyone picks their own Jellyfin user on a profile screen when opening Aurora.
  • Required sign-in: if your instance is reachable from the internet, enable it in Settings → Security (or AURORA_REQUIRE_LOGIN=true). Everyone must then sign in with their Jellyfin username and password before Aurora serves anything — sessions are validated against Jellyfin, stored server-side, and each user’s playback runs under their own Jellyfin session.
  • Admin dashboard: Jellyfin administrators can create, disable, and delete users, edit parental controls, trigger library scans, and watch active sessions from /admin.

Deployment

Section titled “Deployment”

Aurora ships as a Node server with a production Dockerfile. On every release the GitHub Actions workflow publishes the image to both Docker Hub (getcoral/aurora) and the GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io/get-coral/aurora). The examples here use Docker Hub.

Terminal window
pnpm build
pnpm start

pnpm start runs node server.mjs and is what the image runs.

Native builds

Section titled “Native builds”

Aurora also ships PWA and Capacitor wrappers for installable web, Android and iOS builds. Those need JDK 21 and the pnpm cap:* scripts; the repository README is the reference for that workflow.

Contributing

Section titled “Contributing”

Aurora is open source and welcomes contributions. See the Contributing guide for details.

Section titled “Related”