/title. I’m a complete TrueNAS noob and I’m struggling to get PLEX up on it. Can anyone share a link to an absolutely basic tutorial? I can install and deploy it, but I’m lost on how to ensure it has the right storage permissions, ACL, etc. Also, the Youtube tutorials I’ve come across show a PLEX pass box check in the configuration menu, but my menu doesn’t show that. Thank you for help!
My Setup:
Server: Lenovo ThinkStation P520
CPU: Intel Xeon W-2135
RAM: 64GB
Storage: 1x 256 Crucial SSD
2x 3TB WD Green drives in mirror
OS: TrueNAS Scale ver 24.04.2
It’s been a hot minute since i’ve used the build in apps system and i’m going from memory here:
Search for the plex app in the discover apps menu and select install
Give your app a name, name can’t start with a capital letter
Decide wether you want to use ix-volume or hostpath for config storage
(hostpath wouldb be easier for a reinstall since ix-volume gets deleted when the app is deleted)
If you choose hostpath create a dedicated dataset for plex config files, called e.g. plex-config
edit permissions of the dataset so that user “apps” id 568 has read/write access
if you already have a plex server go to Claim | Plex to generate a claim token for your existing plex server. If you don’t have an existing plex you can skip this part. (plex token is only valid for 5 Minutes)
Add your Media Datasets as additional storage like this:
/path/to/your/media and mount it to something like /media or /movies etc.
Edit Permission on Media Dataset so user apps has the correct permissions to read and write to the Media Dataset.
If you want to use a gpu for transcoding add id now or later, don’t know how the setup step is called in the install menu
This should be all you need to do to get it to run
The plex pass app is most likely from an old video for the Truenas core bsd plugin and should not be nessessary for the scale app.
Thanks again for your help. I had issues earlier with deploying that were resolved once I hard rebooted the physical server. I’m having difficulty understanding the right permissions needed in order to grant access to the media folder for Plex. I want to make a SMB share be the folder for Plex, any issue with that? Can you point me to a video or something that shows me how to properly configure my permissions on the media folder?
the plex app should use user 568 “apps”. If you give user and group 568 read&write permissions on the smb dataset you should not have problems with permissions.
So here’s the thing though. Plex’s user id is 568, but I don’t have a user 568. Attempting to create a new user with the UID 568 causes an error message that says that UID is already in user by user: apps. I added user apps to the ACL list for the share, and I can see the parent directory, but no child folders. I applied the ACL recursively too. This is so frustrating.
user 568 is a system user and system users are hidden by default. That’s why it’s complaining when you try to create it. In the menu where you list the users there should be a menu point or checkpoint to show/hide system users.
Thanks again for helping me figure this out. I recusively added the App user group to the share and it’s child folders. This is a screen grab from my Plex web portal. “El_Hidra_SMB” is the dataset in which all of my media reside. The problem is, the media is split further in “Movies,” “TV Shows,” etc. Adding “El_Hidra_SMB” in Plex does not detect any media, and as you can see, there’s no way to navigate further down the path to the Movies or TV Show folders.
I solved my issue. I thought was a permissions issue this whole time, but it wasn’t. I could see my SMB share in the TrueNAS Plex, but none of the child folders. My friend who is much smarter on TrueNAS told me that after adding the data storage path, the child folders are now under /data. Once I navigated to data, I could see all my media. Apparently it’s a remnant of Kubernetes.
I will just report that while I had no troub.e installing plex on my two Scale servers, group/user apps or 568 was not sufficient for plex to see my media in datasets that I had created way back before Cobia. (I have separate datasets for Movies, TV_Shows and Music because it simplifies replications.) Some other permissions issue kept this from happening until I added user 1000. Tried scores of combinations. I really don’t understand what happened, but once I hit on the permission it was off to the races.
