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kube-plex

kube-plex is a scalable Plex Media Server solution for Kubernetes. It distributes transcode jobs by creating pods in a Kubernetes cluster to perform transcodes, instead of running transcodes on the Plex Media Server instance itself.

How it works

kube-plex works by replacing the Plex Transcoder program on the main PMS instance with our own little shim. This shim intercepts calls to Plex Transcoder, and creates Kubernetes pods to perform the work instead. These pods use shared persistent volumes to store the results of the transcode (and read your media!).

Prerequisites

  • A persistent volume type that supports ReadWriteMany volumes (e.g. NFS, Amazon EFS)
  • Your Plex Media Server must be configured to allow connections from unauthorized users for your pod network, else the transcode job is unable to report information back to Plex about the state of the transcode job. At some point in the future this may change, but it is a required step in order to make transcodes work right now.

Setup

This guide will go through setting up a Plex Media Server instance on a Kubernetes cluster, configured to launch transcode jobs on the same cluster in pods created in the same 'plex' namespace.

  1. Obtain a Plex Claim Token by visiting plex.tv/claim. This will be used to bind your new PMS instance to your own user account automatically.

  2. Deploy the Helm chart included in this repository using the claim token obtained in step 1. If you have pre-existing persistent volume claims for your media, you can specify its name with --set persistence.data.claimName. If not specified, a persistent volume will be automatically provisioned for you.

➜  helm install plex ./charts/kube-plex \
    --namespace plex \
    --set claimToken=[insert claim token here] \
    --set persistence.data.claimName=existing-pms-data-pvc \
    --set ingress.enabled=true

This will deploy a scalable Plex Media Server instance that uses Kubernetes as a backend for executing transcode jobs.

  1. Access the Plex dashboard, either using kubectl port-forward, or using the services LoadBalancer IP (via kubectl get service), or alternatively use the ingress provisioned in the previous step (with --set ingress.enabled=true).

  2. Visit Settings->Server->Network and add your pod network subnet to the List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth (near the bottom). For example, 10.100.0.0/16 is the subnet that pods in my cluster are assigned IPs from, so I enter 10.100.0.0/16 in the box.

You should now be able to play media from your PMS instance - pods will be created to handle transcodes, and data automatically mounted in appropriately:

➜  kubectl get po -n plex
NAME                              READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
plex-kube-plex-75b96cdcb4-skrxr   1/1       Running   0          14m
pms-elastic-transcoder-7wnqk      1/1       Running   0          8m