Apt issue with Debian for install: Unable to locate package

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hello forum. I am new here but have been running Plex servers on Debian for years now. I have run into an issue with Apt and the Plex repository on one of my deployments that I cannot seem to isolate.

I have a fresh Debian 12 bookwork running on a dedicated rack server. Bare metal Debian and Plex no virtualization.

Attempting to install plexmediaserver via Apt is repeatedly giving: “E: Unable to locate package plexmediaserver”

I have set the Plex repository source setup:

# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list
deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/plexmediaserver.gpg] https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main

I set the gpg key as:

# curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | gpg --dearmor | tee /etc/apt/keyrings/plexmediaserver.gpg

The key exists matching the path for /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list:

# ls /etc/apt/keyrings/
plexmediaserver.gpg

apt update seems to go okay:

# apt update
Hit:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease
Hit:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates InRelease                                                                                
Hit:3 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security InRelease                                                                 
Hit:4 https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public InRelease                                                                              
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.

Now, installing Plex with Apt and get the error:

# apt install plexmediaserver

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree... Done

Reading state information... Done

**E:** Unable to locate package plexmediaserver

I can ping the URL just fine:

# ping downloads.plex.tv

PING downloads.plex.tv (104.18.36.51) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 104.18.36.51 (104.18.36.51): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=6.84 ms

64 bytes from 104.18.36.51 (104.18.36.51): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=10.1 ms

64 bytes from 104.18.36.51 (104.18.36.51): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=12.8 ms

64 bytes from 104.18.36.51 (104.18.36.51): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=15.4 ms

I cannot at all find an explanation for this as I have checked this config so many times, attempted many OS re-deployments and comparing it with the 4 other Plex servers I have running own the same network yields absolutely no difference in the configs.

Any syslog, journal entries, APT logging shows nothing useful. Any ideas out there on what to check next?

EDIT:
I should add, I do have other 3rd party repos installed, like Ookla for their CLI speed test utility and it works just fine setup in the same way, so I know APT can get HTTPS urls and can get to other repos. Just this plex repo giving me this issue.

2

Did you follow a some guide when you set this up? The repo line doesn’t look default, nor does the retrieval or storage of the key.

The first step to deploying is sudo dpkg -i installing the package you can download here:
https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/?cat=computer&plat=linux#plex-media-server

After deploying that, an apt source will be placed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d for PMS. If you open the plexmediaserver.list file there you only need to uncomment the source line and install the key as instructed in the comments.

I’m not suggesting that what you’re doing is necessarily wrong, but when we have issues it’s best to fall back to best practices.

Note: Updating via apt only supports stable/general release versions. You don’t have the option to install Plex Pass betas via apt.

3

My friend, thank you for your sanity. It seems I got too deep in my confidence of cloning the deployments from my other servers I neglected to realise, this is the one server I have that is not 64-bit and was thus not trying to initiated the deploy with i386 package.

I was simply inserting the necessary entries to files in source, not realizing the initial deploy never happened to set the files.

Here I was beating my head for hours, thank you friend. Marking this resolved.

4

You’re welcome, glad you got it working!

5

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.