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Custom auth headers

Some people put Jellyfin (and its companions) behind an access gateway — Cloudflare Zero Trust, Pangolin, an authenticating reverse proxy — which demands an extra HTTP header before it forwards anything. Without that header every request answers 403, so the app cannot even reach /System/Info/Public.

Custom headers let the user configure those headers per service. They are attached to every request the app makes to that service, and to nothing else.

Where they are configured

Surface What it configures
Login → Advanced: custom headers (mobile and TV) Jellyfin, before the first connection
Settings → Network → Custom headers (mobile) Jellyfin, for the connected server
Settings → Custom headers (TV) Jellyfin plus every integration
Settings → Plugins → Jellyseerr / Streamystats / Marlin (mobile) That integration

Each integration picks one of three sources:

  • Jellyfin — reuse the headers configured for the Jellyfin server (the usual case: one gateway in front of everything).
  • Custom — its own set of headers.
  • None — send nothing (the default).

Storage

Header values are secrets and go to expo-secure-store (Keychain / Keystore). MMKV only ever holds the metadata: the header name, whether it is enabled, and the SecureStore key holding the value. The editors read the values back (masked) so a header can be corrected without retyping all of them.

  • Per-server headers live on the SavedServer entry in previousServers (utils/secureCredentials.ts).
  • Per-integration configuration lives under custom_headers_config_<key> (utils/customHeaders/integrations.ts).
  • Removing a server, or a header row, deletes the SecureStore values behind it.

customHeadersVersionAtom is bumped on every write. Anything that builds a long-lived client from the headers (the Jellyseerr client, image sources) depends on it, so an edit applies without a restart — and it also invalidates the resolution cache in resolve.ts, which keeps every image from re-parsing the server list and re-reading the Keychain.

Which requests get headers

Headers are attached only when the URL belongs to a configured service — isUrlForBaseUrl compares origin and base path. A poster on TMDB, an OpenSubtitles download, or a remote stream referenced by an item never sees them.

Path How
Jellyfin SDK calls request interceptor installed by createApiWithCustomHeaders
Server check on login checkJellyfinServer
Reachability probe jellyfinProbe via NetworkStatusProvider
Session WebSocket third argument of RN's WebSocket in WebSocketProvider
Images <Image> from components/common/ServerImage (it carries expo-image's statics, so it is the only import a screen needs) and getItemImage, whose source wins when it already resolved them
Image prefetch prefetchServerImage
Video playback MpvVideoSource.headers in direct-player
Now Playing artwork (iOS) nowPlayingMetadata.artworkHeaders
Video downloads BackgroundDownloader.enqueueDownload(..., headers)
Trickplay, subtitles, posters File.downloadFileAsync(..., optionsWithOptionalHeaders(...))
Music streams and artwork itemToTrack (TrackPlayer)
Jellyseerr / Streamystats / Marlin getIntegrationHeaders(key)

Rules worth knowing

  • Authorization is dropped. Jellyfin and Streamystats authenticate with that header themselves; a custom one would replace the session token. It is filtered out in normalizeCustomHeaders, so no preset offers it.
  • Nothing is attached when nothing is configured. The helpers in optionalHeaders.ts leave request options byte-for-byte unchanged rather than adding an empty headers object — several native APIs behave differently once the key exists.
  • Disabled, blank, malformed and duplicated rows never reach a request. normalizeCustomHeaders is the single gate.
  • Local network URLs get no headers. Headers are keyed on the remote address; a LAN URL reaches the server directly, bypassing the gateway.

Known limitations

  • MPV applies headers globally, not per URL. They are only sent when the main stream is served by the Jellyfin server. If an item's stream is a remote URL while its external subtitles are on Jellyfin, those subtitles load without headers and fail. Fixing that needs a prefetch-to-local-file path for protected subtitle URLs.
  • Headers are not persisted natively for downloads. The iOS background downloader persists its queue to an App Group container, which is not encrypted; writing credentials there would undo the SecureStore protection. useDownloadReconciliation supplies them again on startup — a download still waiting in the native queue is cancelled and re-queued with its headers. A transfer that native already restarted keeps the request URLSession stored for it, so it is unaffected.