Plex is a feature-rich media library platform that allows organizing and streaming your digital video and audio from virtually anywhere. It can stream to most modern devices including personal computers , smartphones, Roku boxes, tablets, smart TVs, and more.

This tutorial walks through updating Plex Media Server on an Ubuntu instance on EC2.

Set Up To get started, launch an Ubuntu EC2 instance from the Amazon EC2 console . The following settings should be used.

Use Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS as the AMI ID

t2.micro as the tier

In step 3 of Launch Instance Wizard choose "Public Subnet" in VPC and select one that is closest to you

• Use the security group that was created with your instance for SSH access

• Disable password authentication to your instance by following this guide . If you are using a key file, leave it set to "This key pair is associated with an AWS account." Then click "Download Key Pair" - transfer the downloaded file securely to your local machine - and configure your SSH client with the key file you downloaded.

• In step 4 of launch instance wizard, add a new volume from volume type General Purpose SSD ( gp2 )

Install Plex Media Server After the instance is created, follow these steps to install Plex Media Server:

1. Connect to your instance via SSH using the instance-identifying information from the "Access" tab on your instance.

$ ssh -i ubuntu@

1. Update the default Ubuntu repositories:

$ sudo apt-get update

1. Install Plex Media Server and all required dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver-installer

$ sudo service plexmediaserver start

1. The Plex Media Server should now be running on port 32400 . You can verify that Plex has successfully started and is listening on the correct port by opening a web browser and navigating to:

http://:32400

1. You can now use your EC2 instance running Plex Media Server as a media server in the Plex client app, and enjoy streaming your media library!

Configure Plex to run in the background The method described in this step is not necessary (e.g., you may let it run on port 80 or disable port forwarding), but it will make it easier for other users on your network to find the server.

1. Configure Plex to run in the background by editing the default systemd service-file:

$ sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service

1. Copy and paste the following text into the file, save and exit:

   [Unit]

   Description=Plex Media Server for Linux

This orders dropbox to start up before plexmediaserver after updating

the init daemons with update-rc.d

After=network.target local-fs.target dropbox@.service plexmediaserver.service

This enables the service

WantedBy=multi-user.target

1. Now change the default user for Plex Media Server:

$ sudo chown plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library -R $ sudo chmod 775 /var/lib/plexmediaserver -R

[Install]

WantedBy=multi-user.target

Alias=default.target

1. Finally, enable and start your Plex service by executing these commands:

   systemctl enable plexmediaserver.service

2. You can now use the EC2 instance running Plex Media Server as a media server in the Plex client app, and enjoy streaming your media library!