Run Plex as a Docker Container on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose

Goal

Setup a Plex server as a Docker container hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

Mount the media share

Create a target mount point

On the Raspberry Pi, create a directory that will act as the mount point for the remote file share. In this example, we’ll create a directory called /media-share in the root of the file system:

$ sudo mkdir /media-share

Setup credentials to be used to access the NAS media share

Add the NAS media share username and password to a file named cifs-credentials so it can be used when you mount the drive as it’s more secure to store your SMB/CIFS username and password in a credentials file instead of directly in the /etc/fstab file.

$ sudo nano /etc/cifs-credentials

In the editor, enter your username and password like this:

username=<username>
password=<password>

Next, change the permissions of the credentials file to ensure that only root can read and write it:

$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/cifs-credentials

Test the share is mounted

Now you can mount the share using the target mount point and the credentials file. Once mounted browse to the mount and check you can see the contents.

$ sudo mount -t cifs -o credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials //path/share /media-share

$ cd /media-share

$ ls -lh

Configure the share to mount automatically

To ensure that the remote share is automatically mounted at startup, add an entry to your /etc/fstab file and add the following line at the end of the file:

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

//path/share /media-share cifs credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials,nofail 0 0

Run Plex as a Docker container

Create the docker-compose file

Create a new directory to save the Docker Compose file for the Plex container.

$ mkdir /docker/plex

Change directory into the new directory and create a Docker Compose file.

$ cd /docker/plex

$ nano docker-compose.yml

Paste the Plex Docker Compose configuration into the file. This Docker Compose file references the Docker container detailed in the referenced Docker Hub link below.

# Plex Server
# https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/plex
#
# Notes:
# - Web server is found at http://<your-ip>:32400/web
# - Media files are stored on a NAS
# - A path to the NAS is mounted as /media-share

version: "3"
services:
  plex:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/plex:latest
    container_name: plex
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/Copenhagen
      - VERSION=docker
      - PLEX_CLAIM= #optional
    volumes:
      - /opt/plex:/config
      - /media-share/tv:/tv
      - /media-share/movies:/movies
    restart: unless-stopped

Start the Docker container

Run the Docker Compose command to start the container and include the -d so it runs it as detached from the CLI.

$ sudo docker-compose up -d

Connect to the Plex web interface

Connect to the plex server

http://<ip-docker-host>:32400/web

As part of the Plex setup you can browse to the media files using the media folder that is mapped to the media-share mount point.

References

Docker Hub linuxserver/plex

Grinntec GitHub