MediaShelf

A self-hosted web app for figuring out which of the thousands of files in a Plex library are actually worth keeping.

MediaShelf scans a Plex Media Server over its HTTP API and pulls watch history from Tautulli, builds a local snapshot of every movie and TV season, and joins together facts that are never shown side by side — date added, size on disk, file path, owning library, watch count, last watched, and how much of it anyone actually finished — into a sortable, filterable, chartable grid with a tunable reclaim score that ranks deletion candidates.

Status

v1 is report-only. MediaShelf does not delete, move, or modify anything — not a file, not a Plex record. It produces a ranked list, saved rule sets, and CSV export. Deletion is designed for in the roadmap but deliberately not built, so the scanner and the scoring model can be trusted before anything destructive is wired up.

The application is implemented and tested; it has not yet been deployed. The design was validated against the live servers first: 65.7 TB across 24 libraries, 2,930 movies and 2,807 TV seasons, 87,640 logged plays from 60 users, and 27.4 TB never played. See docs/design.md §2.1.

Running it

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
cp .env.example .env          # fill in PLEX_TOKEN and TAUTULLI_API_KEY

python3 -m mediashelf.cli scan --full     # first ingest
python3 -m mediashelf.cli serve           # http://127.0.0.1:8080
make test                                 # 73 tests, no live server needed

Deployment is a single container behind Nginx Proxy Manager — see docs/design.md §11. Build off-box and push the image to Nox's Portainer; docker-compose.yml is the stack.

Layout

mediashelf/
  config.py        every setting, read once from the environment
  db.py            SQLite (WAL) + numbered SQL migrations
  providers/       Plex (library) and Tautulli (history) behind two protocols
  ingest.py        scan orchestration, rollups, keep resolution
  scoring.py       the reclaim score, in SQL and in Python
  rules.py         saved-view grammar -> parameterized SQL, whitelist only
  keeps.py         GUID-keyed keep marks
  queries.py       the item query, live score, dashboard aggregates
  api.py / web.py  JSON API and the page shell
tools/             read-only probe, reclaim preview, fake Plex+Tautulli
tests/             73 tests, run entirely against the fake server

What it does

• Full-library ingest from Plex, no agent on the Plex host, no filesystem mounts
• Movies at item level, TV rolled up to season level
• Watch data from Tautulli, so plays by every account are counted and a play that was abandoned after five minutes is distinguished from one that was finished — Plex's own history reports those identically. Falls back to Plex session history if Tautulli is unavailable, and says so rather than degrading silently
• Sort and filter on every metric; charts for size by library, additions over time, finished vs. abandoned vs. never-opened by size, and size vs. last-watched
• A weighted reclaim score with live sliders, and grace rules so it never recommends something you added last week
• Named, re-runnable saved views — "unwatched, older than 2 years, over 10 GB", "two people started it and nobody finished it"
• Keep marks at library, series, season or movie level, for the things you are holding on purpose — home video, 4K copies, shows you might want someday. Kept items are hidden from the working grid and refused outright by deletion. Marks are keyed on Plex content GUIDs rather than rating keys, so they survive a library rebuild
• CSV export of any view

Stack

Python + Flask, SQLite (WAL), vanilla JS front-end (no build step), single container deployed as a Portainer stack behind Nginx Proxy Manager.

Roadmap

• v2 — two-stage quarantine-then-purge deletion, with authentication, a path allowlist, and an audit log
• v3 — Emby and Jellyfin support behind the existing MediaProvider abstraction

Read-only LAN tools

Plex and Tautulli are both LAN-only, so these exist to check the design and the numbers against real data from inside the network. It is read-only — GET requests only, nothing is modified — and has no dependencies beyond the standard library.

export PLEX_BASE_URL=http://192.168.1.10:32400
export PLEX_TOKEN=...
export TAUTULLI_BASE_URL=http://192.168.1.100:8181
export TAUTULLI_API_KEY=...

python3 tools/probe.py                        # library shapes, sizes, coverage horizon
python3 tools/probe.py --dump inventory.json  # plus a full item inventory
python3 tools/reclaim_preview.py              # the actual reclaim numbers

reclaim_preview.py joins Plex sizes to Tautulli plays the way the application will, and reports never-played bytes per library — split into the confident pool (added while Tautulli was watching, never played) and the uncertain pool (predates Tautulli, might have been watched). It also prints the largest never-played TV seasons and the watcher-count distribution used to calibrate the score.

It reports Tautulli's coverage horizon, the finished/abandoned/never-opened split across real plays, library shapes and sizes, path roots, multi-version items, and whether Tautulli is actually watching the Plex server you think it is. Credentials are redacted from all output including error messages, so the result is safe to paste anywhere.

Documentation

• docs/design.md — the full software design
• tools/probe.py — read-only reconnaissance script
• tools/reclaim_preview.py — read-only reclaim numbers
• tools/mockserver.py — mock Plex/Tautulli for testing the probe