Lev Lazinskiy

Using Plex with Nextcloud

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

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