jellyfin-plugin-sharelinks/README.md

ShareLinks for Jellyfin

Send someone a single movie, episode, season or whole series, without giving them an account, without them seeing the rest of your library.

"here, watch this one film, the link dies tomorrow"

ShareLinks adds a ShareLink button (with a little share icon) to the context menu of any movie, episode, series or season in the Jellyfin web client. It sits in its own section at the bottom of the menu, and it only shows up for those four kinds of item, never for a cast member, a studio, a library or anything else you cannot actually watch. Click it, pick how long the link should live, and you get a URL you can send to anyone. When they open it, they land straight on that title, already signed in, and they cannot wander off into the rest of your server.

No account for them to create, no password for you to hand out, no permanent guest user piling up. The link is temporary, the guest is temporary, and when it expires everything is cleaned up on its own.

I built this for my own server (shared with family and a few friends), because I kept wanting to show someone one specific film without either adding them as a real user or handing over a login that sees everything.

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How it works

1. As an admin you open the context menu on a movie, episode, series or season and hit ShareLink. You choose an expiry (1 hour up to 30 days) and the plugin hands you a link, copied to your clipboard. You also choose there whether the link is single use, which is the default and stops working once the first person opens it, or multi-use, which lets everyone you send it to open it until it expires. A multi-use link has a ceiling on how many people can watch at the same time, ten by default, and the eleventh is asked to try again later rather than displacing anyone.
2. Behind the scenes the plugin tags the shared item with a unique, random tag and records the share. Share a series or a season and the tag is applied to the whole tree underneath it too - series, seasons and episodes - so the guest can actually browse from the series page down into a season and an episode, not just see a single locked node. Lookups only ever go through a keyed HMAC hash of the token, and the link itself is dropped from the record once it is revoked or expired.
3. Whoever opens the link gets a throwaway guest user created on the spot, restricted by that tag to the shared item and its tree, and is signed in automatically. They land on the title's page.
4. When the link expires (or you revoke it), a cleanup pass disables and deletes the guest user and strips the temporary tag from the whole tree again. A scheduled task and a startup pass make sure nothing lingers if the server was off at expiry time.

What the guest sees

Just the shared title (and, for a series or season, its seasons and episodes), and the ability to play them. The confinement is real and it is enforced on the server, not only in the browser:

• The guest's Jellyfin policy only permits items carrying the share's tag, so every other movie, show, library and search comes back empty from the API. Even someone poking at the raw API cannot list your other content.
• On top of that, the web client is locked down for the guest: the home, menu and search buttons are hidden, in-page links (cast, studio, genres) are made inert, "add to playlist" is removed, and any attempt to navigate somewhere outside the shared tree snaps back to the shared title. Navigating within the tree - series to season to episode - works normally.

Playback works normally, including transcoding and remuxing if you allow it, and the player's back button still returns them to the title's page.

One honest caveat: if you share a series or season and new episodes get added to it later, those episodes only pick up the tag (and become visible to the guest) the next time the link is redeemed - not the instant they are added. For a one-use link that has already been redeemed, that never happens, so a one-use link is a snapshot of the tree as it existed at redemption time.

Managing links

The plugin's dashboard page lists every share with its status, the title, a copyable link, the temporary guest name, and an expiry, and lets you revoke any of them on the spot. Revoking runs the same teardown as expiry: guest gone, tag gone.

Hiding other plugins from guests

If you run other plugins that inject their own UI into the web client (a search bar, a floating button), you probably do not want a guest to see them. I had exactly that problem with a different plugin of mine, so the Guest hidden selectors setting is a comma-separated list of CSS selectors that get hidden in guest sessions. It ships with a default that hides that plugin's floating button and panel; add any other plugin's selector and it disappears for guests too, no code change needed.

Security stance

The design goal is simple: a raw share token exists only at the moment it is issued, is returned to you once, and is then forgotten. Persistent storage keeps only a keyed HMAC hash of the token plus the metadata needed to audit and clean up the link. So:

1. raw tokens are never logged
2. only the token's HMAC hash is used to look a link up
3. the finished share URL is kept on the record while the link is live, so the dashboard can re-copy it, and is dropped again the moment the link is revoked or expires
4. token validation is a hash comparison
5. guest-user creation and teardown live behind explicit service calls
6. the real access boundary is the server-side tag policy; the web-client lockdown is convenience on top of it

The same applies to the guest's login. The plugin mints the guest session itself on the server, using Jellyfin's own session manager. No password is ever stored anywhere, not even encrypted, and no password ever appears in the page sent to the guest. The only thing the guest's browser receives is a session token scoped to that one guest account, and that token dies the moment the guest account is cleaned up. On top of that, the guest account is assigned an authentication provider that refuses every interactive sign-in, so the normal login page cannot be used to get into a guest account at all, password or not. If the plugin is disabled Jellyfin falls back to its own invalid-provider handling, which refuses too.

What a multi-use link does and does not protect

A multi-use link is by design usable by anyone you send it to, so treat the URL itself as the secret. Within that:

• The tag policy is per account and the account is the same one, so every viewer still sees exactly the shared title and nothing else. Letting more people in does not widen what any of them can reach.
• The viewer ceiling caps how many people can start watching at once. It is not a hard cap on how many people ever get in: sessions end, and each redemption issues its own session token which keeps working until the link is revoked or expires. If you need a hard stop, revoke the link.
• Everyone shares one temporary account, so they share playback position and watched state on that title, and they can see each other's sessions in Jellyfin. If that matters to you, use single-use links.
• Reaching the ceiling turns the new arrival away with a "try again" page. It does not disturb anyone already watching, and it does not kill the link.

Known limits

• The share token travels in the link's query string, so it will appear in your reverse proxy's access log and in browser history.
• Redeeming is a public endpoint with no rate limit. Tokens are 256-bit random, so guessing one is not realistic, but the endpoint is reachable by anyone.
• Records are kept after they expire, for audit, and are never pruned.
• The sharelinks- tag is hidden from non-admins in the web client only. It is still present in the API response for anyone who looks, because that tag is what confines the guest and it cannot be removed without removing the confinement.

Configuration

All of these live on the plugin's dashboard page:

Setting	What it does
Default / maximum expiry	The default the menu offers, and the ceiling a link may be set to
Public base URL override	Force the host used when building links (otherwise derived from the request)
Guest username prefix	Prefix for the throwaway guest accounts (default share-)
Allow transcoding / remuxing	Whether guest playback may transcode or remux
Cleanup interval	How often the background cleanup runs
Maximum viewers per multi-use link	How many people may watch one multi-use link at the same time (default 10, 0 means no limit)
Single use by default	How the single-use box starts out in the create popup; it is a per-link choice
Guest lockdown	The web-client confinement described above (on by default)
Guest hidden selectors	CSS selectors hidden from guests, to suppress other plugins' UI

Known limitation: cast and crew

Jellyfin has a core bug (jellyfin/jellyfin#14926) where a user restricted by tags loses the Cast & Crew section entirely, because the tag filter is applied to people as well as to media. Since a ShareLinks guest is tag-restricted, they hit this: the shared title's page shows no actors, director or writer. This is a server-side Jellyfin issue, not something the plugin can style around. A workaround inside the plugin is possible and on the list.

Compatibility

• Jellyfin 10.11 (targetAbi 10.11.0.0), .NET 9. Tested on 10.11.8.
• The UI injection targets the standard Jellyfin web client, and works with both the English and French interface.

Install

Dashboard => Plugins => Manage repositories => New repository => https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Franciskid/jellyfin-plugin-sharelinks/main/manifest.json

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Credits and license

Developed by Franciskid.

Licensed under the GPL-3.0, like most Jellyfin plugins.

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