Prairie

Prairie is a self-hosted media streaming server for movies, shows, music, and books. It is an AGPL-licensed fork of Silo, rebranded with its own project identity while preserving the same core goal: point Prairie at your media folders and stream to your devices at home or away with direct play, remuxing, and hardware-accelerated transcoding handled automatically.

Highlights

• Plays your media, your way — direct play when the device supports it, remux or hardware-accelerated transcode when it does not.
• Web app included — a full-featured web client and admin interface ship with the server.
• Jellyfin-compatible surface — optional compatibility APIs support clients such as VidHub, Findroid, and Infuse.
• Household profiles — multiple profiles per account, with per-profile watch state and parental controls.
• Plugin-driven metadata — match and enrich libraries with providers like TMDB and TVDB through plugins.
• Fast setup — one docker compose up -d starts the default stack; most configuration happens in the admin UI.

Deploy with Docker

1. Copy the example environment file:

   cp .env.example .env

2. Edit .env and set at least your media path:

   MEDIA_ROOT=/path/to/your/media

   New Prairie installs default persistent bind mounts to /opt/prairie, with the app's internal paths under /var/lib/prairie and transient transcodes under /tmp/prairie-transcode. You can override the host root with PRAIRIE_DATA_ROOT.

3. Start the integrated stack:

   docker compose up -d

   This starts PostgreSQL, Redis, and the integrated Prairie server. The web app is available at http://localhost:8090.

The default PostgreSQL user and database are prairie. The published image defaults to ghcr.io/prairie-server/prairie-server:latest.

Optional NVIDIA/NVENC

GPU support is kept in a compose override so hosts without NVIDIA drivers work unchanged:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.nvidia.yml up -d

Or set COMPOSE_FILE=docker-compose.yml:docker-compose.nvidia.yml in .env on Linux/macOS (; instead of : on Windows).

Optional Live TV LAN discovery (HDHomeRun)

Admin Live TV → Tuners → Discover on LAN uses SiliconDust UDP broadcasts (port 65001). Bridge-mode Docker usually blocks that path; Dispatcharr / HDHR URL probe still works without changes.

On Linux, enable host networking for the Prairie service:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.livetv.yml up -d

Or set COMPOSE_FILE=docker-compose.yml:docker-compose.livetv.yml in .env.

Details, Docker Desktop limits, and Dispatcharr probing: docs/livetv-tuner-discovery.md.

Migrating from Silo

See docs/silo-to-prairie-migration.md for the Phase 1 path, environment variable, PostgreSQL, and Meilisearch cutover checklist. Legacy SILO_* runtime environment variables are accepted as fallbacks where the server reads them directly, but new installs should use PRAIRIE_*.

Existing Continuum-to-Silo migration notes remain in docs/continuum-to-silo-docker-migration.md for historical installs that need that earlier hop.

Build from source

Prerequisites: Go 1.26+, pnpm, PostgreSQL, Redis, and FFmpeg.

cp .env.example .env
make build
./prairie

The server listens on http://localhost:8080 by default when run from source.

Useful development commands:

make dev-backend
make dev-frontend
make lint
make verify-local-paths

Contributing

Prairie is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later. Contributions should preserve the AGPL notices and the web UI's Source link. See DEVELOPMENT.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and docs/ai-contributions.md for local workflow and contribution expectations.

Trademark and attribution

Prairie is a fork of Silo. Silo names, logos, and wordmarks remain trademarks of their owners and are used only referentially. Prairie uses its own name and brand assets; see TRADEMARK.md.

The source code is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE.