Plex won't enter my home directory or other partitions

I just installed the Plex media server from the Ubuntu Software Center, and opened the web interface. I wanted to start by adding a collection. When it gave me a file browser, I wanted to go to /home/robin/Videos. /home is as far as I got. It showed robin, with an arrow in front of it, but when I tried to expand the directory tree it was empty. The same happened when trying to access /media/Data. For me it's quite useless like this, as all of my media files are inside those 2 directories.

Help would be much appreciated.

My first guess seemed to be a correct one; It is, as always, a permissions problem. How do I give plex access to my home folder without also giving other users access to it? My home folder is encrypted by the way, so that'll probably complicate things a little.

robin@RobinJ:~$ sudo -u plex bash
[sudo] password for robin: 
bash: /home/robin/.bashrc: Permission denied
plex@RobinJ:~$ ls -al
ls: cannot open directory .: Permission denied
plex@RobinJ:~$ cd /home
plex@RobinJ:/home$ cd robin
bash: cd: robin: Permission denied
plex@RobinJ:/home$ ls -al robin
ls: cannot open directory robin: Permission denied

Solution 1:

Plex is run under plex username, so you may encounter the following permission issues:

• Ubuntu restricts access to /media/$USER through ACL (that's the "+" when you ls -l /media). Solution below.
• Your drives may not be mounted to allow plex user to read it. Check it with ls -l on the drive or folder that cause issue, to see the group owner, group permissions and user permissions. Solution below.
• Your folder may not allow plex user or group to read it. Use sudo chmod -R u+r FOLDER to allow all users. Or add flex user to the folder group (see below) and use sudo chmod -R g+r FOLDER.

Fix permissions to allow Plex to access /media/$USER

Check which group you and plex belong to:

groups
groups plex

Now, add plex user to your user group, and allow this group to access /media/$USER:

MYGROUP="$USER"
sudo usermod -a -G $MYGROUP plex
sudo chown $USER:$MYGROUP /media/$USER
sudo chmod 750 /media/$USER
sudo setfacl -m g:$MYGROUP:rwx /media/$USER
sudo service plexmediaserver restart

Fix permissions of NTFS partitions

NTFS partitions must be mounted with appropriate read rights in /etc/fstab:

Check your user and group id (1000 and 1000 in example):

id

Edit /etc/fstab to mount the drive with read permissions for your user group and for all users (cf. umask, which is 777 less the desired "chmod" number):

UUID="XXXXXX" /media/USERNAME/MOUNTPOINT ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=002 0 0

Fix permissions of mdadm RAID disks

If you're using mdadm, this may be needed in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf:

CREATE mode=0775

Solution 2:

You've got two options I think. You can run plex media server as your user, or you can add yourself and plex to a group and give that group access to your home folder. I run Plex Media Server on OS X for the time being, so I haven't run into this problem myself, but the fix should be fairly trivial. This link explains how to add users to groups in linux, that's the way I think I'll be going when I switch my Plex server to Ubuntu.

Solution 3:

Add plex as a user in your group , then add root as a user in your group .

then type sudo gpasswd -a root yourusernamehere,sudo gpasswd -a plex yourusernamehere you will have to give sudo password which is your password and then run this command using your drive path , mine is /media/PLEX for my external drive input your path here where u see /media/PLEX

find /media/PLEX -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;; find /media/PLEX -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

This will ultimately allow plex to use your files & folders. Hope this helps.