How To Install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. 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. With Plex, 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 on a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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).
• 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04.

Import the Plex repository’s GPG key using the curl command:

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

Next, add the Plex repository to the Ubuntu system:

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

Finally, everything we need is to get the packages of plex are at place, and its time to run a single command to install it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install plexmediaserver

Now Plex media server is installed. We can check its status with:

sudo systemctl status plexmediaserver

Step 3. Configure Plex.

Now, open a web browser and type the following address. Change the IP address with your Ubuntu 20.04 IP address:

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

To use the Plex Media Server, you will need to create a Plex account or sign in with your existing account or sign in to Google/Facebook or Apple account.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Plex. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Plex Media Server in Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Plex Media Server website.