Plex Permissions on Raspberry Pi OS

[Gamer127]

I have the latest version of PMS running on a Raspberry Pi 4, running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS.

When I try to add media to Plex, I can see very few folders (see screenshot.) I understand that this is because of Plex running as the user ‘plex’ and that the user that I configured Raspberry Pi OS with is ‘pi’.

What is the most effective way of giving permissions to the ‘plex’ user?

I have a mixture of files that are stored in a folder on the desktop, and also on an external HDD, which is formatted as NTFS (and needs to stay as NTFS.)

There are a lot of guides out there on Google, but I’m never sure which is correct / up to date.

[jester_tenet]

Assuming you have access to the command line on the server chown and chgrp would be simple ways of doing it

[Gamer127]

I do indeed. I have run the following:

sudo chown -R plex:plex /media/pi/Elements/Media

However, the folder doesn’t show the owner as being ‘plex’

Is there something wrong with the command that I am issuing?

[ChuckPa]

When you mount USB drives (pretty much ANYTHING in /media)

1. Don’t let the automounter do it. Permissions look right but never work.
   (Nautilus does what it wants and not what it’s told )

2. Make a mount point directory away from /media which is stable and username-idependent.

This How-To has been available for a while

Linux Tips

Using other hard drives (Windows or Linux) with PMS This How-To is written to help with Internal and External drives. It also is written to demonstrate how to cope with NTFS and EXT4 formatted drives. By logical extension, any format supported by Linux can be handled using the technique shown here. In all cases, the goal is to give user plex permission to read your media files which Linux doesn’t allow by default due to its strict security model. We will walk through the steps needed …

The TL;DR -

1. You own the media and have full control.
2. You grant ‘plex’ permission (RO or RW) as you deem appropriate
3. Issues disappear