Use Docker to Set Up Plex on a Synology NAS (Tutorial)

hey everyone today we're going to take a look at how you can install plex on a synology nas using docker now the main reason we're going to take a look at this today is because the dsm-7 release candidate version that was just released last week does not currently have a plex package that is working so the plex package that had worked in the beta unfortunately something changed between the beta and the release candidate version and that package will no longer work now plex is basically blaming synology but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter what matters is that we don't have a working package so we need to look into alternative methods if we'd like to have plex working on dsm-7 so in this case docker works great and the steps are relatively straightforward so before we get started i just want to mention that i have full written instructions for all of this in the description of the video so the first thing that you have to do is make sure that you have docker installed and if it is installed you'll see in the shared folder section that you have another folder called docker inside the docker folder we're going to create a folder named plex and then inside of that we're going to create three subfolders one named config one named transcode and one named data after that's done you can launch docker and then you're going to have to open the registry and download the latest plex inc slash pms-docker image this is the official docker image for plex it's going to take a little bit for this to download but once it's done you should be able to double click the image and then you're going to launch the configuration tool so at this point you can give your container a name and then you can select advanced settings make sure that you enable auto restart and then you're going to click into the volume section now we're first going to map three volumes we're going to map the config folder that we created to the forward slash config location we're going to map the transcode folder to the forward slash transcode location and we're going to map the data folder to the forward slash data location these are the three default volumes that we have to create this basically ensures that if you ever want to move this plex container off of this nas onto a different device you can just copy these folders map the volume and everything should stay the same now that's the default plex information the next step is going to be different for everybody and it's dependent on how you have your media file set up on your nas so for me i have a media folder and inside of that i store all of my media files so i have a movies folder i have a tv shows folder and i have a music folder however there are a lot of people that have three separate shared folders for every single media type so if you have it set up the way that i have it set up you can go through and you can select the media folder that you have and then you can map it to the forward slash media location if you have it split up you're gonna have to create three different or five different however many folders you have you're gonna have to map those different shared folders to different locations now you can use whatever name you want so if you wanted to do forward slash movies and forward slash tv shows etc you can do that basically the the forward slash location on the right hand side here doesn't matter that you can put as whatever you want and the folder on your nash you just have to make sure you're mapping the correct media folder so that's the only tricky part as far as this goes you just have to make sure that you map your media properly next we're going to head over to the network section and we're going to select use the same network as docker host now once that's done we have to take a step back and we're going to have to ssh into our synology nas we'll get to why in a second but if you don't know how to ssh into your synology nas i will leave a pop-up for that now but once you're ssh'd in we have to run a command that will give us the user id and the group id of a user that has access to our media folders so when you created your shared media folder you had to give specific permissions to either users or groups and in this section we have to pass the user id and the group id of a user account that has permission to those shared folders to our docker container so that it can actually access those files the easiest way to probably think about this is that the default docker user that the container is run with does not have permission to access your media files so we're going to give it a user account that does have permission to those media files so that it can basically impersonate that user and access the media so in order to do that you're going to type in the command id and then the username of whatever that user is from there you should see the user id and you should see the group id so for me it's 1026 and group 100 because my users group has permission to those media files if for whatever reason you have a different user group that has access to those media files you'll have to use that so once that's done you can head back to dsm and you're going to have to open the environment variables section and you're going to create two variables you're going to create one for pu id and one for guid and you're going to substitute the information with whatever you found in the last step so like i said for me it's 10 26 and group 100 for you it might be different but you're just going to put whatever you had there now i'm going to say this one more time because it is very important you have to make sure that the group that you put here and the user that you put here have permission to those media files if you put different values and they don't have permission you're not going to be able to find those files when you launch plex so once you do that you can apply all of your settings and you can create the container so it's going to take a few seconds for the container to get started but you'll be able to then navigate to the ip address of your synology nas port 32400 forward slash manage in the rent instructions i have exactly the url that you'll have to type out but when you get there you're going to have to sign in with your plex username and password if you don't already have an account you can go ahead and create one here and then you're gonna have to give your server a name once that's done you can select next and then you're gonna have to create your media file locations here so you can select add library you can select whatever content type you'd like to use and then you're going to have to find that media folder now you're going to have to do this for every type of media file that you have so for most people i'm assuming you're going to have movies music and tv shows but there are people that might have things like home movies and other things and you're going to have to create different media types based on whatever type of files that you have so make sure that you create one for each of those locations you're going to need one per folder so make sure you do that and when you're done you can select next and then done now at this point plex is going to start to crawl in all of your media and it's going to try to get all the cover art and metadata now depending on the size of your media library this is going to be something that can be done relatively quickly or something that might take a long time so obviously the more that you have the longer it's going to take but at this point everything is set up and configured so you're going to be able to go through and you're going to be able to connect from whatever media devices that you have that normally you stream your plex content to and you should be able to find the server and you should be able to stream any of that media at that time now i want to be clear that if you're watching this video at a later time when the dsm-7 plex package works there's nothing inherently wrong with using it generally that's probably what the majority of people are using the reason why we're implementing this is because dsm-7 right now doesn't work with plex now there's nothing wrong with keeping plex running on docker if you implement it for a lot of people they actually prefer that because it is more portable at that time basically you're able to take these three folders that we created the data config and transcode folders and you can put this onto a different machine running docker and everything should function the same as long as you mount those volumes properly so just keep that in mind uh but hopefully this all made sense to you guys if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments if the video helped you out give it a thumbs up and please consider subscribing to the channel thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 23,214

Keywords: synology nas plex, synology nas docker plex, docker plex synology nas, plex synology nas, plex dsm 7, dsm 7 plex

Id: DSNYTaYW10Y

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021