Getting started

Connect Kochab to the services that run your self-hosted media stack.

Kochab talks straight to your own services. There is no Kochab account to create and no server of ours between your phone and your stack: you add each service by address and API key, and the app keeps those credentials in your device keychain.

Add your first service

Open More, then Stacks & Services, then the + in the top right and choose Add service. Adding a service takes three short steps: where it is, its credentials, and a connection test that has to pass before anything is saved.

If you would rather not type addresses, Find services on that same menu scans your network and offers what it finds.

Full walkthrough: Add and configure a service. Per-service ports and where to find each API key: Service setup guides.

What a stack is

A stack is one set of services that live together, usually one machine or one reverse proxy with a different port per service. Your first service sets the host, and everything you add afterwards prefills it, so most services need only a port.

Most people never need a second stack. Add one when you genuinely manage a separate box.

Finding your way around

Five tabs, organized by what you are doing rather than by which service answers:

  • Home - service health, what is downloading, what is playing, and what lands this week.
  • Search - find a title across your libraries and request or add it.
  • Downloads - the queue across every download client at once, with pause, resume, and retry.
  • Library - everything you have, plus a calendar and a wanted list.
  • More - Activity (who is watching), Requests, Analytics, Stacks & Services, and Settings.

One screen answers one question, so a job that spans three services is still one place in Kochab. Health, queue, activity and upcoming releases all land on Home together, whichever services happen to supply them.

When something needs a second look

  • Homelab services often use self-signed TLS. Kochab shows you the fingerprint and asks before it trusts anything. See Certificate trust.
  • Reaching your stack through a reverse proxy, tunnel, or VPN has its own traps, including single sign-on gates that silently block API access. See Reverse proxies and remote access.
  • If a service fails the connection test at Add Service, see Why won’t Kochab connect to my service? for the checklist, in the order that actually finds the cause.