Does Emby follow symbolic links?

[Guardian87 4]

I changed my library setup to look at symbolic links, which then link to different hard drives in the background. Since I did that, adding files doesn't automatically trigger a library scan and I do this manually at the moment. Is my assumption correct, that this is caused by symbolic links or do I have to look for something else?

[Carlo 4561]

This is likely caused by the Symbolic links.

You would be better off adding the different paths directly to the library in question.

[Guardian87 4]

Thanks for the feedback. I split up the underlying hard drives and really wasn’t keen on readding the entire library and so on. So I imagine there is no easy way to make it work with symbolic links?

[Carlo 4561]

What OS are you using?

[Guardian87 4]

Raspbian, the Debian Version for raspberrypi.

[Carlo 4561]

Sorry, got nothing for you on that platform as I don't know it.  Sorry about that!

[Luke 42080]

Support is limited based on what the .net core runtime supports:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/24655

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/24271

However it appears there has finally been some movement, so following the release of .net core 6, that hopefully means a future version of Emby Server should be able to more easily support them.

[TheShanMan 40]

@LukeWith the .net runtime giving you what you need some time ago, is there any hope of supporting symbolic links soon? I have some library annoyances that I hoped to solve by making use of symbolic links. However, I'm seeing that while most of my libraries appear to work perfectly with symbolic links, a few silently fail to scan (no errors or anything relating to file paths in log) resulting in a library of zero items.

I'm on Windows if that matters.

[Luke 42080]

1 hour ago, TheShanMan said:

@LukeWith the .net runtime giving you what you need some time ago, is there any hope of supporting symbolic links soon? I have some library annoyances that I hoped to solve by making use of symbolic links. However, I'm seeing that while most of my libraries appear to work perfectly with symbolic links, a few silently fail to scan (no errors or anything relating to file paths in log) resulting in a library of zero items.

I'm on Windows if that matters.

It would require some restructuring but yes it's doable.

[TheShanMan 40]

How soon do you think that would be possible? I don't want to get my hopes up if it's a pipe dream that has no realistic chance of being worked on anytime soon.

[Luke 42080]

2 hours ago, TheShanMan said:

How soon do you think that would be possible? I don't want to get my hopes up if it's a pipe dream that has no realistic chance of being worked on anytime soon.

I can’t really say at this time, sorry.

[TheShanMan 40]

Which probably means "don't hold your breath". Haha. I spent quite a few hours writing and testing a script to create a new directory structure of symlinks from my existing structure based on a small sample size working well. So it's disappointing to find that it randomly just doesn't work in some cases. I won't die without it though. Thanks Luke.