Linux password for 'plex' user

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Plex Media Server installed on Ubuntu 16.04 LXC on Proxmox.

New to Plex and was not aware it lacked a native method for uploading media. Might as well store the media in the same LXC, at least for now. I see a user in /etc/passwd named plex which does not have a nologin shell, rather bash in /var/lib/plexserver. I could assign it /home/plex for libraries but I’ll need a password. I see in some installation docs the assigning of a password for user plex, but I don’t remember assigning one when dpkg installed PMS. Easy enough to assign a password to that user, but what (if anything) will that break?

thanks~

TV Shows not finding ANY matches
2

user plex, while having a shell for su plex purposes (administration by root from an interactive session) does not have any use / need for a login shell.
From a security perspective, it’s best not to assign it one either. Leave it as the ‘impossible password’ it is.

From other Proxmox LXC user threads (there are few), Proxmox containers, like any Linux container, are problematic based on environment.

What specifically are you trying to do and which distribution are you running in the container?

3

I’ve been using Proxmox for years and run quite a bit of infrastructure in containers. This is a minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LXC, in which PMS was installed via a downloaded .deb file.

No problem choosing another user, then granting plex the appropriate permissions in its home directory.

4

This should be easy for you then.

  1. Create a service override file in /etc/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service.d named override.conf

  2. In it put the following

    Move Plex to /home/plex

    [Service]
    Environment=“PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR=/home/plex/Library/Application Support”

  3. create /home/plex

  4. set plex:plex as the owner of of the new home.

  5. do a tar | tar copy from the old dir to the new dir

  6. systemctl daemon-reload

  7. systemctl start plexmediaserver

That’s it.

5

I created a new user called plexmedia, made it a member of the plex group, and then su -l into it:

plexmedia@pms:~$ chmod 774 libraries/
plexmedia@pms:~$ mkdir libraries/movies
plexmedia@pms:~$ mkdir libraries/television
plexmedia@pms:~$ mkdir libraries/music
plexmedia@pms:~$ mkdir libraries/photos
plexmedia@pms:~$ mkdir libraries/homevid
plexmedia@pms:~$

Log in to webUI, add standard libraries mapped to each folder and then scp a pile of music into /home/plexmedia/music/ and watch the vm stats climb. Fascinating watching zfs eat and relinquish memory as the files come in, then see the Plex container working away at indexing.

6

As long as group plex is in control, you should be ok. It’s when folks add user plex to their group things go sideways because PMS doesn’t look at anything but its own UID & GID…