A Plex Media Server that is backed by an Amazon S3 Bucket.
A while back a good pal of mine introduced me to Plex. I started looking up stuff about it like its features, system requirements, and how it works, then before I know it, I had my own server set up to run 24/7! Having experience with Amazon AWS and Digital Ocean, I figured, it would be extremely simple to not only get a Plex Server up and running in the cloud, but also have my entire library of movies and TV shows backed up in the cloud as well through Amazon's S3 buckets. I choose Amazon S3 for my storage because of it's dirt cheap pricing and flexibility. Also, you don't have to use the root user, I did because I didn't know what I was doing with my first attempt and I just stuck with it. It is better if you create your own user with the sufficient privileges, but can be done however you desire. This doesn't have to be done through DigitalOcean. You can use any VPS you want, I used DigitalOcean because I was familiar with it.
In order to start, you must first create a VPS (Virtual Private Server) using Digital Ocean or one of its competitors. First, go to Digital Ocean and create an account using my referral code to get yourself a $10 credit to see if you want to stick with it.
After your account is created, log in and create a new droplet.
It doesn't matter which pricing option you choose, just be sure you choose one with enough transfer to upload all of your content because it all has to be uploaded through the server.
When it asks you what distribution of Linux to install, be sure to choose the latest version of Ubuntu.
After your droplet is created, I recommend using SSH instead of the web console. On PC, get Putty, and for Mac, open terminal and type ssh root@your-ip-here and replace youriphere with the IP of your droplet. It will prompt you for your password, enter it and your in!
Secondly, you must create a Amazon AWS S3 Bucket. To do this, you must first have an Amazon AWS account. To create one, visit this link.
After your account is created, log in and click on "S3" under "Storage & Content Delivery" and create a new bucket.
After your bucket is created, click on your name at the top right corner and from the drop-down menu choose "My Security Credentials". Click on "Access Keys" and "Create New Access Key" and download the file. This file contains your access key and secret for accessing your S3 bucket outside of the web portal. If you do not download them, you will have to delete the previous key and generate a new one.
Now, to install plex-s3fs, just run the snippet in the terminal of the Digital Ocean Droplet:
(install snippet if you don't fully
understand what it does. Seriously, DON'T!)
bash <(curl -s -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicholasadamou/plex-s3fs/master/install.sh)That's it! ✨
In order to properly configure our Plex server, we need to add the required claim token. To add the token, you will need to use ssh tunneling to gain access and setup the server for first run. During the 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. Since we are setting up PMS (Plex Media Server) 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:localhost:32400 -N
The creator of this repo is not responsible if your machine ends up in a state you are not happy with.
Copyright Nicholas Adamou
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.