Media Server won't start

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#:1.25.7
Player Version#: works

Sometime this week, Plex Media Server just stopped loading at startup. When I try to start it, nothing happens, no crash report, nada. I downloaded the latest version and still nothing.

OSX 12.2.1

Any ideas?

2

If the Plex Media Server won’t start and doesn’t even get to the stage where it’ll be writing to the server logs, you can attempt the following procedure to see if there’s any error messages on the OS level:

  1. Open Finder and navigate to /Applications
  2. Select Show Content from the context menu of the Plex Media Server.app item
  3. Navigate to Contents/MacOS
  4. Open the Terminal app
  5. Drag the Plex Media Server executable from the Finder window (#3) into the Terminal Window and press Return to execute it

This is no different from running the app, so it won’t succeed – but you should get a more specific error message about what’s causing it to fail starting.

3

Thanks for that info.

Here’s what it says. Mind you, I haven’t made any permissions changes in that directory in ages

PMS: failure detected. Read/write access is required for path: /Users/brianlapan/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server
4

Well… could be the permissions or some of macOS’ security settings (though the latter shouldn’t impact the app’s own application support folder). Did you already check the permissions?

5

Yes, checked all permissions. I’m gonna completely uninstall everything and start from scratch and see if that does it. I’ll follow up if it does or doesn’t. Thanks for your help so far.

6

Uninstalling the server won’t change the permissions in your application support folder.
You should be able to apply them in 1 step using Finder’s Get Info for the ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server folder, review the permissions and then apply them to all subfolders.

7

Weirdly, that file didn’t exist. Just an Alias to a non existent place - I looked for it. So, uninstalling all Plex pieces all over my disk and reinstalling fresh did do the trick. I don’t understand how it got there but am grateful for your help and that the solution - deleting Plex and it’s pieces (I use AppCleaner) and reinstalling everything from scratch seems to do the trick. At least for now. It’s indexing the files as I type.

Thanks again.

8

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