The Movies library had indexed 2,571 films and had never asked a provider
for a single one: no TMDb id, no plot, no rating, no poster. Nothing was
broken in the provider chain — the plugin is core in 12.4 and active, its
key is set, image.tmdb.org answers the container — and nothing was broken
in the write path: the overlay view has been read-write since the 2026-10-31
cutover, and movie.nfo lands on the NVMe upper layer today.
The state was two settings in the per-library option file,
config/root/default/<Library>/options.xml (Jellyfin 12 renamed it from
library.xml; the database stores none of these options, so a census that
greps for the old name and then queries the DB concludes nothing is
configured and goes hunting elsewhere):
<EnableInternetProviders>false</EnableInternetProviders>
<TypeOptions><ImageFetchers /> (empty, beside a populated
<MetadataFetchers> and a fully
populated <ImageFetcherOrder>)
With the internet switch off every refresh answers 204, stores nothing and
logs nothing, so the item count reads like a healthy scan — this passed the
deploy health gate, the Playwright suite and three agent audits. Order is
not enablement: the fetcher ORDER stays populated while the ENABLED set sits
empty, and the populated metadata list beside it makes the library look well.
verify now audits every library's options.xml and fails with `SILENT INDEX
<Library>: <what>` on providers-off or on a type whose image fetchers are
empty while its metadata fetchers are named; an options.xml that never
carried the switch (BoxSets, written before the property existed) is the
vendor default and stays accepted.
Vault: the page claimed artwork is a sidecar like movie.nfo. It is not — no
image saver is bound for any library, so art goes to the internal store and
Plex never reads it. The claim is corrected, and the RemoteImages diagnostic
that separates a provider fault from a library fault is written down with
the 12.x API shape traps (Items needs UserId; MetadataRefreshMode has no
Full/ValidationFailure, ReplaceAllMetadata=true is what re-runs providers).
Jellyfin 12 ships TMDB, TVDB, StudioImages and MusicBrainz as core plugins:
no DLL, only a configuration file under the data root, so the keys have to
reach that XML from somewhere that is not git. They live in the fleet's
per-service env-file convention -- /home/dank/Containers/jellyfin/provider-keys
(TMDB_API_KEY=, TVDB_API_KEY=, optional TVDB_PIN=, mode 600) -- and
scripts/jellyfin-providers.sh plan|install|verify reads only that file, prints
no key byte, and refuses a keys file that is not mode 600 or that has no line
for the provider about to be written. install is idempotent: it never touches
a key the UI already saved, backs up every XML it edits into
~/.AGENTTRASH/<date>-jellyfin-providers/ first, and only installs the TVDB
plugin when the pinned official zip carries the plugin guid.
The deployer runs install BEFORE it restarts jellyfin, because the plugin and
its keys are read at start-up and a restart-first deploy boots the old state.
A missing keys file warns instead of failing: a host without the keys still
deploys, degraded rather than broken. No plugin configuration XML is tracked.
Frank