How To Install Plex Media Server on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Plex Media Server is a great multimedia tool that will turn your Ubuntu into a features multimedia server. You can stream your music or movies from any device at home.

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 the step-by-step installation of Plex Media Server on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Plex.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Plex Media Server on Debian 9 Stretch

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

apt update
apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Plex Media Server on Debian.

Plex Media Server is not available in the official Debian package repository. We’ll be using the Plex official repository. Start by importing the repository’s GPG key using the following curl command:

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb ./public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Once the Plex repository is enabled, update the apt package list and install the latest version of the Plex Media Server:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https
sudo apt update
sudo apt install plexmediaserver

Then, start Plex Media Server and enable it to start on boot time by running the following command:

systemctl enable plexmediaserver.service
systemctl start plexmediaserver.service

Step 3. Configure Plex.

Now, open a web browser and type the following address. Change the IP address with your Debian IP address:

http://Your-Server-IP:32400/manage

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Plex. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the Plex Media Server on the Debian 9 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Plex website.