Using Plex with Nextcloud

December 6, 2017 | software | foss | devops |

After hearing about it for years, I finally got around to installing plex on my nuc. I’m impressed with everything about Plex. It was easy to install, and mostly works out of the box. I am using it to manage my ever growing movie collection and massive music library.

All of my files were already on the nuc since I am using Nextcloud. Rather than duplicating the files, I pointed my media library to the same directory where my files are in my nextcloud installation.

This poses a couple of permissions problems. On Ubuntu, this directory is owned by the www-data (apache) user and group. In order to get plex to be able to see the files at all I had to add the plex user to the www-data group and then restart the plex service. The following commands will make that happen:

sudo usermod -aG www-data plex
sudo systemctl restart plexmediaserver.service

My biggest complaint with most "home media servers" is that once you point the files to the right place, you cannot really "manage" most of them. For instance, I have a massive (50+ GB) music collection that I have built up over the years. When I am listening on shuffle I want to prune out some of the songs that I hate. Luckily, with plex this is very simple. The only catch is that the www-data group needs to have read/write/execute access to those files.

In order to make this happen you can run the following command against your data file. Be sure to replace the directory I have below to whatever you are using for your own Nextcloud files.

chmod -R 775 /var/www/nextcloud/data/levlaz/files

Doing these two things makes the Plex + Nextcloud integration work very well. Now whenever I add or remove files from my many different computers everything stays in sync.

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