Running without lemonfiber

This is the load-bearing guarantee, and everything else about customisation is convenience next to it: the stack runs with no lemonfiber binary anywhere.

lemonfiber-media-stack is a real Compose project, not a set of files a tool generates. Clone it, set a few variables, and run docker compose yourself. That is what makes adopting lemonfiber a reversible decision — and it is why the suspicion an experienced operator brings to a tool that wraps a system in an opaque layer is answered here rather than argued with.

Running it

cp .env.example .env      # set DATA_ROOT, and VPN credentials if using torrents
docker compose --profile search --profile usenet --profile torrent \
               --profile tv --profile subs up -d

That five-profile set is the tv form. Forms are named profile sets and nothing more, so anything lemonfiber can start you can start by naming the profiles yourself.

The repository’s own tasks read the sets out of stack.toml, so they cannot drift from what lemonfiber would start:

just forms-list           # search, dl, hunt, tv, movies, music, books, …
just up tv
just down tv

Docker Compose v2.20 or newer is required, because compose.yml uses include:.

What is in the repository

File	What it is
stack.toml	The manifest lemonfiber consumes — services, profiles, forms
compose.yml	Stitches the fragments together; declares no services of its own
compose/	One fragment per profile — tv.yml, media.yml, torrent.yml, and the rest
compose/_common.yml	Shared service defaults, reached through extends:
.env.example	Every variable, documented
stacks/	An overlay for NAS and copy mode
config/	Seeded templates for Recyclarr, Homepage and Caddy
scripts/	The checks CI runs, all runnable locally through just

The shortest working .env is DATA_ROOT plus, if you want torrents, a WireGuard key. Everything with a sensible default already has it.

Two variables are worth reading before you change them. DATA_ROOT is the single data root, and downloads and media both live beneath it on one filesystem so that imports hardlink instead of copying. LAN_BIND decides where the household services publish; the administrative services are always on 127.0.0.1 and that is not configurable, because they hold full control of the stack and most ship with weak or disabled default authentication.

The escape hatches from the other side

You do not have to leave lemonfiber entirely to stay in control of what it does.

Flag	What it buys
--dry-run	Prints the exact underlying invocation and changes nothing. Nothing is generated that you cannot read
--stack-dir <PATH>	Operates your own stack directory instead of the embedded one. lemonfiber validates only the manifest contract

And every interactive action has a flag-driven equivalent that runs unattended and exits with a meaningful status. That is what makes lemonfiber scriptable, and what stops a friendly interface from becoming a cage.

What you give up by leaving

Plain Compose runs the services. It does not do the things lemonfiber exists to do, and it is worth being clear about which those are.

• The proofs. That the VPN is actually carrying the torrent traffic, and that imports are hardlinking rather than copying, are observations of the running result. Compose starting a container is not one of them.
• The wiring. Roughly thirty connections between the services — download clients registered in each library manager, indexers pushed out, root folders, subtitle providers, request targets, dashboard keys. Each is otherwise configured by hand, in a different interface, by copying a value from somewhere else.
• Drift protection. Nothing records what was written, so nothing can tell your edit from a stale default. See adopt and reset.
• One health answer. Twelve containers up while traffic leaves outside the tunnel is not a healthy stack, and only something computing health from findings rather than from container counts will say so.

Where to go next

Adding a service is the same repository from the editing side, and the stack manifest is the file that keeps the two halves in step. The media-stack repository is its own page, and the requirement behind this one is F1 customisation.