Introduction

Plex is a popular media server that allows you to organize and stream your media collection to any device, including TVs, smartphones, tablets, and more. It is a powerful tool for managing your personal media library and making it available to all of your devices.

If you’re running a CentOS 8 server, you may be wondering how to install Plex using Podman. In this post, we’ll show you how to do it step by step.

Prerequisites

Before you start, there are a few things you’ll need to have in place:

• A CentOS 8 server with a non-root user that has sudo privileges.
• Access to the internet from your server.
• Podman, a container runtime for Linux, installed on your server. If you don’t have it installed, you can install it using the following command:
• sudo dnf install podman

Installing Plex Media Server using Podman on CentOS 8

To install Plex Media Server using Podman on CentOS 8, follow these steps:

1. First, create a directory where the Plex Media Server data will be stored. For this example, we’ll create a directory called plex in the /srv directory:

sudo mkdir /srv/plex

2. Next, open the firewall for port 32400 using firewalld. Run the following commands to do this:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=32400/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

3. Create a Podman container for the Plex Media Server using the following command:

sudo podman run --name plex -d -p 32400:32400 -v /srv/plex:/config -v /your/media/library:/data plexinc/pms-docker

This command will download the latest version of the Plex Media Server Docker image and run it in a container. The -d flag will run the container in the background, while the -p flag will expose the container’s port 32400 to the host’s port 32400. The -v flag will mount the /srv/plex directory as the /config directory inside the container, and will mount your media library as the /data directory inside the container.

4. Once the container is running, you can access the Plex Media Server web interface by opening a web browser and going to the following URL:

http://your-server-ip:32400/web

Replace your-server-ip with the actual IP address or hostname of your server.

5. When you access the web interface for the first time, you’ll be prompted to create a new admin account and add your media library. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete these steps.

6. Once your media library is added, you can access it from any device that has the Plex app installed.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how to install the Plex Media Server using Podman on CentOS 8. With Plex installed, you can organize and stream your media collection to any device, making it easy to enjoy your favorite movies, TV shows, music, and more.

We hope this tutorial has been helpful. Thanks for reading!