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.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
The Gentle Singularity from Sam Altman
Whale Watching from https://popagandhi.com/

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025)

Today's links Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 20…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 21, 2025

Hiding metrics from the web

In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on. “What’s going on here is that these quantifica…

via Manual do Usuário June 21, 2025

It's like surfing

The weird thing about engineering management is that you feel kinda useless. Yet if you stop, projects stop.

via swizec.com RSS Feed June 21, 2025

Generated by openring