How to Install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi

Hello everyone, welcome to my blog. Today we are going to learn more about Raspberry Pi. On this article, we are going to learn how to install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi with Raspbian 9 Stretch OS. Plex Media Server is a great application that will turn your Raspberry Pi into a rich features multimedia streaming server. On this tutorial, my Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian 9 Stretch. You may want to read my tutorial How to install Raspbian 9 on Raspberry Pi.

Steps to Install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi

Step 1. Install Raspbian 9

If you haven’t done this step, you can read my tutorial to install Raspbian 9 on Raspberry Pi. Raspbian 9 is based on Debian 9 Stretch. Its a great OS for your Raspberry Pi.

Step 2. Add Plex Media Server Repository

Now we need to add the repository. Open Terminal or connect to your Raspberry via SSH. Then, execute the following commands to setup the repository

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb https://dev2day.de/pms/ jessie main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list

Now Update the repository index

sudo apt update

Step 3. Download Plex

The following command will download Plex package to your computer

sudo apt-get install -t stretch plexmediaserver-installer

Wait until the installation completed

Step 4. Change Permission

Now open the Plex Media Server configuration file. Its located in /etc/default/plexmediaserver.prev. I usually use nano to edit the file

sudo nano /etc/default/plexmediaserver.prev

Now find the line that say:

PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USER=plex

Change it to this one

PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USER=pi

Now restart the service

sudo systemctl restart plexmediaserver

Step 5. Finalizing the installation

Basically, your server is ready. Open a web browser, and then type your Raspberry IP address with the following format:

http://192.168.100.14:32400/web

Change the IP address with your actual Raspberry IP address. You can get your Raspberry IP address with this command

ip addr

Output example:

pi@raspberrypi:/etc/apt/sources.list.d $ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1
 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
 valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
 inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
 valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
 link/ether b8:27:eb:8f:67:a1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
 inet 192.168.100.14/24 brd 192.168.100.255 scope global eth0
 valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
 inet6 fe80::487d:6b63:fb10:badb/64 scope link 
 valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

You should see the following window opened in your web browser

You need to sign in with your PLEX account or sign up a new one. You can use your Google account to sign in.

You can then create library and add some movies, videos or music to your collection. Thank you for reading this post on How to install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi.