How To Install Plex Media Server on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Plex is a client-server media server that lets you organize and stream your music, movies, pictures on your PC. It is a very powerful & useful piece of software to organize, manage, and share your media collection.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Plex on a CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Plex Media Server on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Plex Media Server on CentOS 8.

Now we add the official Plex repository:

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/plex.repo

Add the following lines:

[PlexRepo]
name=PlexRepo
baseurl=https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/rpm/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key
gpgcheck=1

After adding the repository, proceed to Install Plex Media Server on CentOS 8:

sudo dnf install plexmediaserver

Once the installation is completed, start the Plex media service and enable it to start after system reboot with the following command:

sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver.service
sudo systemctl enable plexmediaserver.service

Step 3. Firewall Configuration.

To be able to access the Plesk Media Server over the Internet we need to configure our server to allow connections on some ports:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=plex --zone=public --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 4. Accessing Plex.

To finalize setting up the Plex Media Server, open your browser and browse your server’s address as shown:

http://your-server-ip:32400/web

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Plex. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Plex Media Server on CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Plex website.