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Official Docker container for Plex Media Server

plexinc/pms-docker

With our easy-to-install Plex Media Server software and your Plex apps, available on all your favorite phones, tablets, streaming devices, gaming consoles, and smart TVs, you can stream your video, music, and photo collections any time, anywhere, to any device.

Usage

Before you create your container, you must decide on the type of networking you wish to use. There are essentially three types of networking available:

The bridge networking creates an entirely new network within the host and runs containers within there. This network is connected to the physical network via an internal router and docker configures this router to forward certain ports through to the containers within. The host networking uses the IP address of the host running docker such that a container's networking appears to be the host rather than separate. The macvlan networking creates a new virtual computer on the network which is the container. For purposes of setting up a plex container, the host and macvlan are very similar in configuration.

Using host or macvlan is the easier of the three setups and has the fewest issues that need to be worked around. However, some setups may be restricted to only running in the bridge mode. Plex can be made to work in this mode, but it is more complicated.

For those who use docker-compose, this repository provides the necessary YML template files to be modified for your own use.

Host Networking

docker run \
-d \
--name plex \
--network=host \
-e TZ="<timezone>" \
-e PLEX_CLAIM="<claimToken>" \
-v <path/to/plex/database>:/config \
-v <path/to/transcode/temp>:/transcode \
-v <path/to/media>:/data \
plexinc/pms-docker

Note: If your /etc/hosts file is missing an entry for localhost, you should add one before using host networking.

Macvlan Networking

docker run \
-d \
--name plex \
--network=physical \
--ip=<IPAddress> \
-e TZ="<timezone>" \
-e PLEX_CLAIM="<claimToken>" \
-h <HOSTNAME> \
-v <path/to/plex/database>:/config \
-v <path/to/transcode/temp>:/transcode \
-v <path/to/media>:/data \
plexinc/pms-docker

Similar to Host Networking above with these changes:

Bridge Networking

docker run \
-d \
--name plex \
-p 32400:32400/tcp \
-p 8324:8324/tcp \
-p 32469:32469/tcp \
-p 1900:1900/udp \
-p 32410:32410/udp \
-p 32412:32412/udp \
-p 32413:32413/udp \
-p 32414:32414/udp \
-e TZ="<timezone>" \
-e PLEX_CLAIM="<claimToken>" \
-e ADVERTISE_IP="http://<hostIPAddress>:32400/" \
-h <HOSTNAME> \
-v <path/to/plex/database>:/config \
-v <path/to/transcode/temp>:/transcode \
-v <path/to/media>:/data \
plexinc/pms-docker

Note: In this configuration, you must do some additional configuration:

Using docker-compose on ARM devices

The provided docker-compose templates use the plexinc/pms-docker image from Dockerhub which is currently only build for amd64 and won't work on ARM devices.

To use docker-compose with ARM devices, you must first build the image for ARM locally.

docker build --platform linux/arm64 -t plexinc/pms-docker:latest .

or

docker build --platform linux/arm/v7 -t plexinc/pms-docker:latest .

Then you can docker-compose up.

Parameters

The following are the recommended parameters. Each of the following parameters to the container are treated as first-run parameters only. That is, all other parameters are ignored on subsequent runs of the server. We recommend that you set the following parameters:

These parameters are usually not required but some special setups may benefit from their use. As in the previous section, each is treated as first-run parameters only:

Users/Groups

Permissions of mounted media outside the container do apply to the Plex Media Server running within the container. As stated above, the Plex Media Server runs as a specially created plex user within the container. This user may not exist outside the container and so the PLEX_UID and PLEX_GID parameters are used to set the user id and group id of this user within the container. If you wish for the Plex Media Server to run under the same permissions as your own user, execute the following to find out these ids:

$ id `whoami`

You'll see a line like the following:

uid=1001(myuser) gid=1001(myuser) groups=1001(myuser)

In the above case, if you set the PLEX_UID and PLEX_GID to 1001, then the permissions will match that of your own user.

Tags

In addition to the standard version and latest tags, two other tags exist: beta and public. These two images behave differently than your typical containers. These two images do not have any Plex Media Server binary installed. Instead, when these containers are run, they will perform an update check and fetch the latest version, install it, and then continue execution. They also run the update check whenever the container is restarted. To update the version in the container, simply stop the container and start container again when you have a network connection. The startup script will automatically fetch the appropriate version and install it before starting the Plex Media Server.

The public restricts this check to public versions only where as beta will fetch beta versions. If the server is not logged in or you do not have Plex Pass on your account, the beta tagged images will be restricted to publicly available versions only.

To view the Docker images head over to https://hub.docker.com/r/plexinc/pms-docker/tags/

Config Directory

Inside the docker container, the database is stored with a Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server in the config directory.

If you wish to migrate an existing directory to the docker config directory:

Useful information

Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat

If you get the following output after you have started the container, then this is due to a patched version of Docker (#158)

plex    | s6-supervise (child): fatal: unable to exec run: Permission denied
plex    | s6-supervise avahi: warning: unable to spawn ./run - waiting 10 seconds

As a workaround you can add - /run to volumes in your docker-compose.yml or -v /run to the docker create command.

Intel Quick Sync Hardware Transcoding Support

If your Docker host has access to a supported CPU with the Intel Quick Sync feature set and you are a current Plex Pass subscriber, you can enable hardware transcoding within your Plex Docker container.

A list of current and previous Intel CPU's supporting Quick Sync is available on the Intel website.

Hardware transcoding is a Plex Pass feature that can be added to your Docker container by bind mounting the relevant kernel device to the container. To confirm your host kernel supports the Intel Quick Sync feature, the following command can be executed on the host:

lspci -v -s $(lspci | grep VGA | cut -d" " -f 1)

which should output Kernel driver in use: i915 if Quick Sync is available. To pass the kernel device through to the container, add the device parameter like so:

docker run \
-d \
--name plex \
--network=host \
-e TZ="<timezone>" \
-e PLEX_CLAIM="<claimToken>" \
-v <path/to/plex/database>:/config \
-v <path/to/transcode/temp>:/transcode \
-v <path/to/media>:/data \
--device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri \
plexinc/pms-docker

In the example above, the --device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri was added to the docker run command to pass through the kernel device. Once the Plex Media Server container is running, the following steps will turn on the Hardware Transcoding option:

  1. Open the Plex Web app.
  2. Navigate to Settings > Server > Transcoder to access the server settings.
  3. Turn on Show Advanced in the upper-right corner to expose advanced settings.
  4. Turn on Use hardware acceleration when available.
  5. Click Save Changes at the bottom.

NOTE: Intel Quick Sync support also requires newer 64-bit versions of the Ubuntu or Fedora Linux operating system to make use of this feature. If your Docker host also has a dedicated graphics card, the video encoding acceleration of Intel Quick Sync Video may become unavailable when the GPU is in use. If your computer has an NVIDIA GPU, please install the latest Latest NVIDIA drivers for Linux to make sure that Plex can use your NVIDIA graphics card for video encoding (only) when Intel Quick Sync Video becomes unavailable._

Your mileage may vary when enabling hardware transcoding as newer generations of Intel CPU's provide transcoding of higher resolution video and newer codecs. There is a useful Wikipedia page here which provides a handy matrix for each CPU generation's support of on-chip video decoding.

Windows (Not Recommended)

Docker on Windows works differently than it does on Linux; it uses a VM to run a stripped-down Linux and then runs docker within that. The volume mounts are exposed to the docker in this VM via SMB mounts. While this is fine for media, it is unacceptable for the /config directory because SMB does not support file locking. This will eventually corrupt your database which can lead to slow behavior and crashes. If you must run in docker on Windows, you should put the /config directory mount inside the VM and not on the Windows host. It's worth noting that this warning also extends to other containers which use SQLite databases.

Running on a headless server with container using host networking

If the claim token is not added during initial configuration you will need to use ssh tunneling to gain access and setup the server for first run. During first run you setup the server to make it available and configurable. However, this setup option will only be triggered if you access it over http://localhost:32400/web, it will not be triggered if you access it over http://ip_of_server:32400/web. If you are setting up PMS on a headless server, you can use a SSH tunnel to link http://localhost:32400/web (on your current computer) to http://localhost:32400/web (on the headless server running PMS):

ssh username@ip_of_server -L 32400:ip_of_server:32400 -N