How To Install Plex Media Server on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Plex is a free piece of software that allows you to organize your movies, TV shows, music, and photos in one beautiful elegant interface and stream those media files on your PC, phone, TV, on the network or over the Internet. Plex can run on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Windows, and various NAS systems.

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 Media Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• 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 Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget software-properties-common apt-transport-https

Step 2. Installing Plex Media Server on Debian 11.

By default, Plex is not available to install directly from the Debian 11 base repository. Now we add the official Plex repository to your system:

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -

Next, import the repository:

echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Now update the software repository index and install it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install plexmediaserver

Step 3. Configure Firewall.

Now we open port 32400 in the Debian system firewall:

sudo ufw allow 32400

Step 4. Accessing Plex Media Server Interface.

Once successfully installed, you need to configure and finish the setup through the WebUI. To access this, open your preferred Internet Browser and navigate to http://your-ip-address:32400/web.

Create a Plex account. This makes it easier to access the server, as it will bind to your account. After signing up, a Plex Pass prompt will appear.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Plex. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of Plex Media Server on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Plex website.