Fixing Permissions Problems on Your Linux Plex Server!

[@potrosas8066]

You were the only one I had the patience to listen and actually helped me. Thank you kind sir

[@KeepItTechie]

No problem!! Salute!

[@alecmesa7563]

Thank you so much for the in-depth tutorial. I struggled for HOURS trying to get the permissions setup for everything to work correctly and was not able to find a guide that I could understand until I found this video.

[@stevehaessler9150]

Exactly what I needed. Just moved my Plex from Windows to Linux. Have an issue with Plex accessing the media directories and suspected it is a permissions issue. Excellent video, most helpful. A thousand thanks.

[@KeepItTechie]

Glad I could help.

[@TheTimeProphet]

Ok how many like me was trying to brush that hair off the monitor LOL.

[@cosmickatamari]

Hell yeah Saints! This fixed the issue I have copying personal rips from samba shares to unraid - I just need to remember to do that every time it seems for it to appear in Plex. I'm still having the issue of metadata not matching automatically.

[@reljoy]

Permissions solved my Plex problem. Thank you KeepItTechie for your good advice. Most of my Music was 700 instead of 755.

[@KeepItTechie]

Excellent!

[@arthurkazanis4283]

Hey Josh. Love your work. I am new to Plex but your quick tutorial fixed my issues. Thank you so much. Cheers.

[@mrsphoenix913]

Thank you for this! My hubby uses Plex on his SteamDeck (which uses Linux OS).

[@ClarkTheShark24]

very underrated video, helped me with a lot of struggles i had with my raspberry pi thanks bro!

[@KeepItTechie]

No problem 👍

[@heavenlyderpfowl1180]

what should I do if I have a music folder on an ntfs hard drive but I can't get past /media/[My name] directory to get into my hard drive and my music library?

[@KeepItTechie]

There is a package you can install to mount a ntfs drive. If you're planning to use the drive on linux more often, i recommend you move your data off to another drive and reformat to ext4, then copy music back. You can open Both NTFS and EXT4 on windows.

[@mgmnynyn8718]

hi, thanks for the video. but why i cant find my /opt/plexmedia? thanks

[@KeepItTechie]

If its not there you can create it using the mkdir command. "sudo mkdir /opt/plexmedia"

[@Thiccalus]

Thank you for all your work on these!

[@KeepItTechie]

My pleasure!

[@Well_Edumacated]

i needed this; i love Linux by i struggle with the things i need to know to administrate better. I gave up on a jellyfin sever on linux twice cause i couldn't get the permission right or mounting the drive properly. I am gonna give it another go; i hate having a windows computer in my network.

[@theveka]

when I use chown and chmod it looks like its working as in this video but changes doesnt apply when I ls -la again

[@KeepItTechie]

Make sure you're using sudo with chown and chmod to apply the changes as an administrator. Run the commands as follows: sudo chown -R plex:plex /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies and sudo chmod -R 755 /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies. Additionally, verify that you are targeting the correct directory or file path. After running the commands, re-check the permissions with ls -la /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies to confirm the changes. If the changes still don't apply, it might be due to filesystem-specific issues or mounted drive settings. Let me know if you need further assistance!

[@SeanHarris-zv5ij]

I've followed the tutorial and everything looks exactly like yours but I cannot even add files to my plexmedia directory on my computer. When I try to actually add media to be seen by plex it says "you do not have permissions to create it in the destination"

[@YaMoonSun]

Gotta set your media directory (and parent directories) to 777 to copy/paste media from your user to the plex user's directory, because you no longer are the owner, of said directory.

[@Stretchxiix]

I feel like I'm an idiot. I can get Plex to see my /mnt/HDD but it will not go further. I have tried all the commands to change the permissions and they have went through but still no result in plex. Maybe I'm missing something small or can it be a completely different issue. my directory is /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies

[@KeepItTechie]

Hey there! Don't feel that way, Plex can be tricky sometimes. It has to be a permissions issue with the Plex user not having access to your directory. Make sure the Plex user has read permissions. You can try running: sudo chown -R plex:plex /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies sudo chmod -R 755 /mnt/HDD/Media/Movies If that doesn’t work, check Plex's log files for more clues. Hope this helps!

[@ryanmalone2681]

I don't even understand how you got into the directory. Plex installs itself with caps and spaces and there is no way to get to the directory as a result. one of this worked. Using chmod didn't even change any permissions.

[@OniKuma88]

You saved me my dude. Thank you!

[@KeepItTechie]

Glad to hear it! No problem!

[@Thiccalus]

Thank you for this!!

[@KeepItTechie]

No problem 😊

[@cleightthejw2202]

@Tech-E That Plex- is it on Ubuntu server or is that separate or can it be either? And for a video suggestion (if you haven't done this) Have you done a video on Bash and how to extend the buffer size there? And when and why one might want to extend the buffer? I know I get that issue where the text goes past the size of the window and I can't 'page up/down' on it. Like when you get a list of all the directories/files. Or call a couple different ones but can't scroll up with the arrow key My guess is that is due to the buffer size. I'm not sure though

[@al7lem]

Thank you bro .. u help me a lot 👍

[@coryoutubechannel]

Hey KeepItTechie, 2 questions: 1. My plex media folder is located inside /mnt/hdd1 which is a folder I mounted my internal hdd to. hdd1 has permissions 750, but the plex media folder inside it has permissions 755, yet Plex cannot see the directory when creating a library. If I change hdd1 to 755, Plex can see the plex media folder. Isn't there a way for my plex media to be on my hard drive without making the whole disk have 755 permissions? 2. My hdd1 is also a samba share because I transfer files to it from my windows computer. Right now the owner of hdd1 is my own user profile. If I change my plex media folder's owner to the plex user, I can't transfer files to it from my windows computer anymore. Is there a way to make both work, the samba share and the plex user be the owner as shown in this video? Thanks, great vids, already helped me a ton.

[@KeepItTechie]

Add the plex user to the user group that owns the directory. 750, 7 = Owner. 5 = Owner's Group. 0 = world. example: sudo usermod -a -G . This should solve both isses.

[@coryoutubechannel]

@@KeepItTechieI can bet you just saved me days of headaches. Thanks so much, and for the quick response too, this worked straight away. Security wise, is it OK to have the plex user have group access to my whole hdd1 directory, say if I had some more sensitive data in there at some point outside of the plex media?

[@KeepItTechie]

@@coryoutubechannel You can specify the plex group for the specific folders and leave the main user as the owner. Example sudo chown user:plex -R /mnt/drive/media, this will leave other folder on the drive untouched but set the permissions specifically for the directories used by plex. Little bit more work but this will protect your other folders and keep access for the user.

[@KeepItTechie]

Also remove the plex user from the main user account group. Example sudo gpasswd -d plex .

[@coryoutubechannel]

@@KeepItTechieSomehow when I try that Plex can't see my media directory again. To summarize: /mnt/hdd1 is user as owner and user as group. Permissions 750 /mnt/hdd1/plexmedia is user as owner and plex as group. Permissions 750 I removed the plex user from my user group, which really is what makes it or breaks it so far And Plex can't see the "plexmedia" folder anymore when choosing a library. I must be missing something obvious here but not sure what yet

[@Wired7124]

Thank you!!!

[@Ingeanous]

@11:33 saved the day...

[@KeepItTechie]

Glad it helped!

[@tshepomotsuenyane811]

is there a document for this? i really need it

[@KeepItTechie]

This video really has nothing to do with PLEX. It is simply showing people how to manage permissions in linux. Search chmod and chown. The documentation will break this down.

[@tshepomotsuenyane811]

@@KeepItTechie I managed to get it right after some research. Your video was the catalyst for me to find the right solution

[@KeepItTechie]

@@tshepomotsuenyane811 Glad I was able to help!

[@YaMoonSun]

Turns out, I encrypted my home directory, so I had to sudo chmod -R /home/username first, and then after I used sudo chown -R Plex on the directory I created, I had to sudo chmod -R 777 Plex my Plex directory so I could copy/paste movies from my /home/username/Videos directory without escalated privileges (root)

[@si4632]

the solution is windows 11 pro 3 clicks of a mouse job done lol

[@realpainediaz7473]

3 groups -> 3 octets

[@si4632]

Linux users enjoy copying and pasting acres of text into terminals just to get basic software to work it seems lol

[@CaptainW_rCrimes]

you could have made this video 2 mins long edit: didnt even work so its a waste ether way

[@loyaltabk]

cd /opt/plexmedia/ returned "no such file or directory"

[@KeepItTechie]

Did you create the location first? Also check permissions.

[@eddie947]

@@KeepItTechie dumb question here but how do I do that? Thanks for all your help so far!