docker-plex

Description

This is a Dockerfile to set up Plex Media Server.

Usage

Building

Build the image with docker build -t plex . in this directory.

Running

Plex depends on Avahi and it's own GDM network discovery protocol to work so while there may be ways around this, the easiest way is probably to run the container on the same subnet as your LAN.

Since Docker is currently quite inflexible in its network setup, I personally resort to some ugly hacks to get around this. You might have better luck using something like Pipework to set up networking.

Set Up a Bridge on the Host

I used Ubuntu's KVM networking guide to create a br0 interface which is bridged to eth0 and uses DHCP. If you want a similar setup, add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
  bridge_ports eth0
  bridge_stp off
  bridge_fd 0
  bridge_maxwait 0

Now just restart networking (service networking restart) or reboot.

Running the Container Using the Bridge

Docker allows you to overwrite the container's LXC configuration using -lxc-conf. While this is an ugly hack, I took advantage of it to set up networking manually in the container. I completely disabled Docker's network management on the container with -n=false. The container stores all the Plex configuration in the /config directory, so it may be a good idea to create a bind mount with the host with -v for persistent storage.

Example

The following starts the plex container with:

• The host's /srv/media/videos mounted inside the container's /videos
• The host's /srv/media/music mounted inside the container's /music
• The host's /tank/virt/config/plex mounted inside the container's /config for persistent configuration storage.
• No network management from docker (-n=false)
• Bridged networking using the br0 bridge with an IP address of 192.168.1.10 and gateway of 192.168.1.1

docker run -d -n=false \
  -v /srv/media/videos:/videos \
  -v /srv/media/music:/music \
  -v /tank/virt/config/plex:/config \
  -lxc-conf="lxc.network.type = veth" \
  -lxc-conf="lxc.network.flags = up" \
  -lxc-conf="lxc.network.link = br0" \
  -lxc-conf="lxc.network.ipv4 = 192.168.1.10" \
  -lxc-conf="lxc.network.ipv4.gateway=192.168.1.1" \
  plex

Now just navigate to http://192.168.1.10:32400/web/ to set up Plex.