How to Install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi can be used in many different projects. One of the Raspberry Pi’s most popular use case is to turn Raspberry Pi into a home media center.

Plex is a popular streaming media server that lets you organize your video, music, and photo collections and stream them to all of your devices at any time and from anywhere.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to install Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi.

Prerequisites

We’re assuming that you have Raspbian installed on your Raspberry Pi . Plex Media Server doesn’t need a graphical interface so our recommendation is to use the Raspbian Stretch Lite image and enable SSH . This way your Raspberry Pi will have much more available processing power and memory to run the Plex media server.

It is also advisable to use external storage to store your media files. A spare SSD or USB drive will do the job.

Install Plex Media Server

The easiest way to install and manage Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi is by using the official Plex repository. It requires no technical knowledge and it should not take you more than 20 minutes to install and configure the media server.

Login to your Raspberry Pi via SSH and follow the steps below to install the Plex Media Server:

1. Start by updating the packages index and install the dependencies necessary to enable a new repository over HTTPS:sudo apt update

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

Next import the repository’s GPG key and add the APT repository to your system’s software repository list by running the following commands:

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Once the Plex repository is enabled, update the package list and install the latest version of the Plex Media Server with:

sudo apt updatesudo apt install plexmediaserver

The installation may take several minutes.

To verify that the Plex service is running type:

sudo systemctl status plexmediaserver

The output should look something like this:

● plexmediaserver.service - Plex Media Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Active: active (running) since Sun 2019-05-26 08:11:09 EDT; 27min ago
  Process: 11470 ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c /usr/bin/test -d "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}" || /bin/mkdir -p "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}" (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 11474 (sh)
  CGroup: /system.slice/plexmediaserver.service