MovieDB

A self-hosted movie and TV browser built on the full IMDb datasets. Everything lives on your own server, so it keeps working at home even when the internet is down.

Features

• Browse and search all 12M+ IMDb titles and the people credited on them
• Title pages with plot, trailer, full cast and crew, streaming availability and more from TMDB
• Rate titles and people (half-star steps), mark titles watched or add them to your watchlist
• Custom lists with CSV/JSON export
• Recommendations based on your ratings, watched titles, watchlist, a list or a single title
• Follow directors and actors to see their upcoming and recent releases
• Letterboxd sync (daily watchlist sync plus full import from a Letterboxd export zip)
• Filter by the streaming services you subscribe to
• Offline: posters, details and all assets are stored locally and pre-cached for the most popular titles
• Weekly automatic IMDb rebuilds, swapped in atomically while the site stays up
• Infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts (press ?) and a mobile-friendly layout

Requirements

• Linux with systemd
• Python 3.12+
• About 20 GB of free disk space (11 GB database, a temporary copy during rebuilds, plus the image cache)
• A free TMDB API key for posters, plots, credits and streaming data (optional but recommended)

Install

./setup.sh

This creates a venv, installs the dependencies, writes .env, and installs and starts an moviedb systemd service. The IMDb database builds on first start, which takes about 30 minutes.

Then open http://<server-ip>:5000, go to Settings, and add your TMDB key, Letterboxd username and streaming services.

Running manually

python3 -m venv venv
venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
venv/bin/python app.py

To build or update the database by hand, run venv/bin/python importer.py.

Configuration

Set in .env (see .env.example):

Variable	Default	Description
HOST	0.0.0.0	Address to bind to
PORT	5000	Port to listen on

Everything else is set in the web interface under Settings.

Files

Path	Description
app.py	Web app (Quart), background scheduler, TMDB and Letterboxd
importer.py	Downloads the IMDb datasets and builds imdb.db
setup.sh	Installer and systemd service setup
imdb.db	IMDb database, rebuilt weekly
user.db	Your ratings, lists, watched/watchlist, settings and caches
data/	Downloaded datasets, importer status and cached images
templates/	Page templates
static/	CSS, JS, icons and bundled front-end libraries

Back up user.db. Everything else can be rebuilt.

Data sources

• IMDb non-commercial datasets (personal, non-commercial use only)
• TMDB for plots, images, credits, trailers and streaming availability (streaming data provided by JustWatch)
• Letterboxd for watchlist and watched sync, and as a poster fallback