I’ve been running plexmediaserver on my linux rigs for several years now but recently started moving several of my home media services over to docker images.

With a little help from this docker compose yml : https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/plex

I was able to do this fairly quick and painlessly with (nearly) zero down time while retaining all of my historical plex data with my libraries all fully intact.  Hopefully this helps make my plex more portable 🙂

My plex setup has my TV shows on /TV/TV/ and my Movies on /TV/Movies – these are both on a NFS share coming off my qnap NAS. Files are all owned by my user “glaw” (UID 1000) and group “users” (GID 100).

First step was to prep the docker compose file

$ cat docker-compose.yml
—
version: “2.1”
services:
plex:
image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/plex
container_name: plex
network_mode: host
environment:
– PUID=1000
– PGID=100
– VERSION=docker
– PLEX_CLAIM=claim-SyGiy3XXXXXXXXXX
volumes:
– /var/lib/plexmediaserver:/config
– /TV/TV:/TV/TV
– /TV/Movies:/TV/Movies
restart: unless-stopped

Since my media lives out as sub directories under /TV (capitalized), I adjusted the volumes to also reflect the capitalization. The first time around, with /tv and /movies, none of my media was playing.

I got the PLEX_CLAIM token from https://plex.tv/claim – just before I did the docker-compose up down below. The claim token is only good for 4 minutes.

Second I stopped and disabled plexmediaserver on my main linux rig. (SS is an alias to sudo systemctl)

# SS stop plexmediaserver
# SS disable plexmediaserver

Third, make a backup copy of all of my plex data and then chown it so the PUID/PGID in the docker container matches.

# sudo cp -r /var/lib/plexmediaserver /var/lib/plexmediaserver.sav
# sudo chown -R glaw:users /var/lib/plexmediaserver

Next I brought up the docker image. The first time it pulled down all of the docker layers and then started up plex. Each additional time it just recreates the same image since all of the layers are already present.

# docker-compose up

Pulling plex (ghcr.io/linuxserver/plex:)…
latest: Pulling from linuxserver/plex
1f5e15c78208: Pull complete
a8bf534b5e6e: Pull complete
e633a0fa06b1: Pull complete
e26072cac69d: Pull complete
57c07b9b6c59: Pull complete
b2d9d0061554: Pull complete
ec31a11d59ba: Pull complete
43c725c27329: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:f92f4238cd7bc72ba576f22571ddc05461a2467bc0a1a5dd41864db7064d6fa6
Status: Downloaded newer image for ghcr.io/linuxserver/plex:latest
Creating plex … done
Attaching to plex
plex | [s6-init] making user provided files available at /var/run/s6/etc…exited 0.

Lastly, I rebooted the host machine and verified all docker containers were running :

# docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
1760b65b5108 haugene/transmission-openvpn “dumb-init /etc/open?” About a minute ago Up 57 seconds (health: starting) 0.0.0.0:9091->9091/tcp transmission_transmission-openvpn_1
1f35aae81c73 ghcr.io/linuxserver/plex “/init” 24 minutes ago Up 2 minutes plex
c165f0c9d947 ghcr.io/linuxserver/jackett “/init” 24 hours ago Up 2 minutes 0.0.0.0:9117->9117/tcp jackett

The final test was to turn off wifi on my cell phone and verify I could still get to my home plex just as if plexmediaserver were still running natively on the host machine.