Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi 4

This is mainly a guide for myself, but I wanted to put it here so it can help other people as well.

Prerequisites

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4GB RAM, with Ubuntu Server 24.04.

UFW

This step is optional. I like limit the access to the server and use UFW to achieve this. I usually block all traffic but SSH from local network. We will revisit this to open up for Plex Media Server at a later stage.

sudo ufw default deny incoming && \
sudo ufw default allow outgoing && \
sudo ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/24 to any port 22 proto tcp && \
sudo ufw enable -y && \
sudo ufw status verbose

Plex Media Server

Fetch and install Plex Media Server. This package is targeting ARM64. If you are on another architecture, make sure download and install a package compatible with your machine.

wget https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-media-server-new/1.42.2.10156-f737b826c/debian/plexmediaserver_1.42.2.10156-f737b826c_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_1.42.2.10156-f737b826c_arm64.deb

Start Plex and check status.

sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver && \
sudo systemctl enable plexmediaserver && \
systemctl status plexmediaserver

If you have UFW enabled we want to open up port 32400 to access the server via the web.

sudo ufw allow 32400/tcp
sudo ufw reload

External hard drive

For some reason my external drive did not want to mount itself automatically to the Raspberry Pi. But it detected that something was connected, we can check this with List Block Devices.

lsblk

When we know where the external hard drive is connected, we can mount it ourselves.

sudo mkdir /mnt/extdrive
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/extdrive

Access Plex Media Server on your browser, login, configure and happy streaming.

https://<your local ip-address>:32400/web