Link your homelab

Watch parties, Live TV, title requests and game servers are extras. They run on a machine one of your admins owns — your homelab — and the bot is the remote control. We host none of it: the Plex library you already run and the game servers you already host stay on your machine, and nothing streams from us.

Everything else in Asbern needs no hardware at all. A server that has not linked a machine shows their doors greyed out, with the reason — Watch on Community and Servers on Gaming — and nothing else changes.

What you can link

• Watch — watch parties from your own Plex library: Resume, Browse, Saved and Add New. Watch is a door on /menu › Community › Watch — greyed out at the end of the row until a machine is linked, and the first door on Community once one is.
• Live TV — a channel guide, where your Plex already has live TV (a tuner, or an IPTV source such as Threadfin).
• Requests — Add New searches your library and the wider catalogue together. Add this puts a title on your Plex Watchlist, and your own Radarr and Sonarr fetch it. The card that comes back after Add this shows where your requests are, with a Refresh button.
• Game servers — an admin registers them under /menu › Other › Admin › Game Servers, and members start them, see how many are on and get the join details from /menu › Gaming › Servers — greyed out at the end of the Gaming row until there are servers to show.

Until you link anything

Watch keeps its door on /menu › Community › Watch whether or not it is set up — greyed out at the end of the row rather than hidden, so nothing on the other tabs looks broken, and it says what the feature is and that this server has not set it up. An admin reading the same screen is told where to go.

The companion

The hosted bot lives in a datacentre, and your library does not. The companion is a small program that runs on your machine and connects the two.

• You never open a port for it. It dials out to Asbern and keeps that connection open. Commands come back down a connection your machine opened.
• Your machine decides what it answers. It knows a short list of requests and refuses anything else. It only starts game servers that run in Docker, in containers named game-….
• It links your Plex by itself. Press Link Plex in Discord and type the four-character code it shows at plex.tv/link — the card finishes by itself, or press Check now. You never copy a Plex token, and the token never leaves your machine.

Getting it: it is a free download. An admin downloads it from /menu › Other › Admin › Media › Set up, or from the server's card under Your servers on this website — see The companion app. It is the only part of Asbern that runs on your own machine — the bot itself is hosted by us.

⚠ The watch party itself is a web page your members open, so it needs a web address and two ports forwarded to your machine. Set up walks you through it. Game servers need either one forwarded port or a private network your members join.

Where to start

• Watch — /menu › Other › Admin › Media: Set up, Status and Remove. See Media server setup.
• Game servers — /menu › Other › Admin › Game Servers. See Game server setup.
• The companion — the one part that runs on your own machine. See The companion app.

What it costs

Nothing. Asbern is free: every feature on this page is included in every server, and no card is needed.