Plex Update is a BASH script which simplifies the life of headless Linux Plex Media Server users (how's that for a strange description).

This tool will automatically download the latest version for linux (be it plexpass or public version) and if you ask it to, install it for you.

It's fairly easy, but let's take it step by step (if it seems too much, skip to the end for a short version)

You can either just download it as a zip file and unzip it on your server, or you can use git to clone it ( git clone https://github.com/mrworf/plexupdate.git ). The main benefit with git clone is that you can update to latest version very easily.

plexupdate.sh looks for a file named .plexupdate located in your home directory. Please note that I'm referring to the home directory of the user who is running the plexupdate.sh ... If that user is someone else (root for instance) you'll need to make sure that user has the config file set up properly as well.

The contents of this file usually is

[email protected]
PASS="my-secret-plex-password"
DOWNLOADDIR=/a/folder/to/save/the/files/in

Obviously you need to change these three so they match your account information. And if you don't put anything as a DOWNLOADDIR, the tool will use the folder you're executing the script from. So take care.

There are a few other options for the more enterprising user. Setting any of these to yes will enable the function.

• AUTOUPDATE Makes plexupdate.sh automatically update itself using git. Note! This will fail if git isn't available on the command line.
• AUTOINSTALL Automatically installs the newly downloaded version. Currently works for debian based systems as well as rpm based distros. Will fail miserably if you're not root.
• AUTODELETE Once successfully downloaded and installed, it will delete the package (want not, waste not? ;-))
• PUBLIC The default behavior of plexupdate.sh is to download the PlexPass edition of Plex Media Center. Setting this option to yes will make it download the public version instead. If this is yes, then EMAIL and PASS is no longer needed.
• FORCE Normally plexupdate.sh will avoid downloading a file it already has or if it's the same as the installed version, but this allows you to override.
• PRINT_URL Authenticate, fetch the download URL, print it, and then exit.
• REDHAT_INSTALL The commandline used to install .rpm packages, only change if you need special options
• DEBIAN_INSTALL The commandline used to install .deb packages, only change if you need special options

Most of these options can be specified on the command-line as well, this is just a more convenient way of doing it if you're scripting it. Which brings us to...

I'm going to be lazy, just run the tool with -h and you'll find out what you can do. It will basically be a mirror of what section 3 just stated :-)

It's very simple, just execute the tool once configured. It will complain if you've forgotten to set it up. If you want to use the autoinstall (-a option or AUTOINSTALL=YES is set), you must run as root or use sudo when executing or plexupdate.sh will stop and give you an error.

Overall it tries to give you hints regarding why it isn't doing what you expected it to.

• "kaka" is swedish for "cookie"

Open a terminal or SSH on the server running Plex Media Center

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrworf/plexupdate/master/plexupdate.sh
chmod +x plexupdate.sh
echo -e > ~/.plexupdate 'EMAIL=<plex email account>\nPASS="<plex password>"'
nano -w ~/.plexupdate
sudo ./plexupdate.sh -a

If you use certain characters, such as dollar sign, in your password, bash will interpret that as a reference to a variable. To resolve this, enclose your password with single quotes instead of the normal quotes.

Ie, PASS="MyP4$$w0rD" will not work, but changing to it to PASS='MyP4$$w0rD' will