If you’re like me — part developer, part movie enthusiast — you’ve probably dreamed of having a movie library that just works.
No broken links, no missing posters, no chaos in your folders.
Just your movies, beautifully organized, hosted locally, and running on your own system.
That dream turned into Hive, an open-source, self-hosted movie management platform I’ve been building over the past few months.
What Is Hive?
Hive is a self-hosted movie platform that automatically organizes, updates, and syncs your movie collection in real time.
It’s built for people who love control — not just over their media, but also over the systems that power it.
Hive:
- Watches your movie folders for new files or deletions
- Extracts and enriches movie metadata
- Integrates with Jellyfin for playback
- Keeps everything private, local, and under your ownership
It’s like having your own personal Netflix — but one that respects your privacy and runs on your machine.
Why I Built Hive
As both a software architect and a movie lover, I wanted a project that combined both worlds:
something practical, something that solved a real pain point, and something that showcased clean software design principles.
Existing solutions often felt too rigid or too closed.
So Hive became my playground for experimenting with modern architecture patterns — but built around a tangible, fun use case.
How Hive Works (The Tech Stuff)
For the developers out there, here’s the stack:
- .NET 9 — for backend services
- RabbitMQ — event bus for inter-service communication
- PostgreSQL — storing structured data
- Redis — for caching and performance
- Docker Compose — for containerized deployment
- JWT Auth — for secure authentication
Each component of Hive acts as an independent microservice.
They talk through RabbitMQ, stay decoupled, and handle their specific jobs — like file watching, metadata management, or API communication.
That means you can scale, replace, or extend parts of Hive without breaking everything else.
It’s clean, modular, and developer-friendly.
Architectural Highlights
Hive’s design follows a clean architecture approach:
- Domain layer — pure business logic, independent of frameworks
- Infrastructure layer — handles databases, messaging, etc.
- Application layer — coordinates commands, queries, and workflows
This makes it perfect for developers who want to see real-world examples of event-driven microservices in action.
What’s Coming Next
Hive is still evolving, and here’s what’s on the roadmap:
- A sleek web dashboard for browsing and managing movies
- Smarter metadata fetching (trailers, ratings, posters)
- Advanced search and filtering
- Plugin system for future extensions
- Monitoring and performance tracking
The vision is to make Hive not just a tool — but a foundation for experimentation and learning.
For Developers
If you’re interested in:
- Exploring microservice communication
- Practicing CQRS and messaging patterns
- Learning about clean architecture with .NET
- Or just building something cool that manages your movie library
Then Hive is absolutely worth checking out.
The codebase is open, structured, and easy to follow — perfect for anyone who wants to dive into practical, real-world architecture.
Join the Hive
Hive is open-source and growing.
Whether you’re a developer looking to contribute, a self-hoster wanting to try it out, or just curious about the architecture — I’d love your feedback.
🔗 Explore the Project on GitHub
Let’s make movie management smarter, cleaner, and fully our own.
Tags: #opensource #dotnet #microservices #softwarearchitecture #selfhosting #movies #automation