Requests and the household

This is the one part of the stack whose main audience is not you.

For a partner, a housemate or a teenager, the product is Seerr and Jellyfin. They will never see a terminal, a form or a diagnostic. Their whole experience is: search for something, ask for it, and later it is there.

If that experience is poor you hear about it constantly, and the stack gets judged a failure no matter how well the rest of it works.

One account, one door

A household member signs in with their Jellyfin account — the same credentials that let them watch. Seerr authenticates against Jellyfin, so there is no second registration and no second password to lose.

Send people to Seerr, not to Jellyfin. Jellyfin is where they watch, but it is where they finish. Someone who lands there can only play what already exists, and their next move when something is missing is to ask you in person — which is the interruption the stack was installed to remove. Seerr is where a request begins, shows its status, and links onward to playback.

Both bind to your LAN rather than to loopback, because they are useless if a television cannot reach them. Neither is reachable from outside the house by default; that is Remote access, and it is a decision rather than an accident.

The loop has to close

The failure to avoid is silence. A request that disappears into nothing reads as being ignored.

Seerr tells the requester at each point — received, approved or declined, being worked on, ready to watch. lemonfiber’s job is to make sure it is configured to, because the default of silence is what produces “did you get my request?”

Seeing where everything stands

$ lemonfiber household

That shows what the household asked for and where each request stands, grouped by whoever asked, in the words they would use rather than the services’ own. You do not have to open Seerr to find out that something needs attention.

To narrow it to one person, named the way you would say it:

$ lemonfiber household --member ana

Each request is named so you can follow it on its own with lemonfiber trace, which gives you the full per-service detail behind the one-word summary.

The words a request is reported in

State	What it means
Waiting for approval	Asked for, and nobody has approved or refused it yet
Declined	Turned down — it will not be fetched
Getting	Approved and on its way: being searched for, downloaded or imported
Partly here	Some of it is here — a series with only some of its episodes
Here	Here, and playable
Failed	Approved, but the attempt to fetch it failed
Gone	It was here and has since been removed

These are deliberately coarser than the pipeline stages a trace reports. Someone who asked for a film does not need to know that a release was grabbed but not imported; they need to know whether it is here yet, and if not, whether anyone is still working on it.

What can be asked for

The request surface reflects what your stack is actually configured to deliver. Asking for television is meaningless if Sonarr is not running, so it is not offered. Nobody is offered something and then refused.

A request for something already in the library is answered immediately with a link to it, rather than accepted and quietly deduplicated. Something not yet released is accepted and marked as awaiting release, because that is not a failure.

Household accounts

Getting people accounts is Jellyfin user administration today. lemonfiber has no command for creating a household member, issuing an invitation or resetting somebody’s password — the behaviour is specified in D6 Household identity and invitations, and it is not built yet.

What that specification asks for is worth knowing about even so, because it sets the shape: you create an invitation, the household member sets their own password, and you never choose or transmit somebody else’s credentials.

The household never touches lemonfiber

There is no lemonfiber account for a household member, no lemonfiber URL to give them, and no way for them to affect the stack’s operation even accidentally. The boundary is deliberate.

Where is my show? — the detailed answer behind a request’s one-word state
The services — Seerr, Jellyfin, and where they listen
D4 Household request flow — the requirements behind this page
J9 Getting the household watching — the same story end to end