kube-plex
kube-plex is a scalable Plex Media Server solution for Kubernetes. It
distributes transcode jobs by creating pods in a Kubernetes cluster to perform
transcodes, instead of running transcodes on the Plex Media Server instance
itself.
How it works
kube-plex works by replacing the Plex Transcoder program on the main PMS
instance with our own little shim. This shim intercepts calls to Plex
Transcoder, and creates Kubernetes pods to perform the work instead. These
pods use shared persistent volumes to store the results of the transcode (and
read your media!).
Prerequisites
- A persistent volume type that supports ReadWriteMany volumes (e.g. NFS,
Amazon EFS) - Your Plex Media Server must be configured to allow connections from
unauthorized users for your pod network, else the transcode job is unable to
report information back to Plex about the state of the transcode job. At some
point in the future this may change, but it is a required step in order to make
transcodes work right now.
Setup
This guide will go through setting up a Plex Media Server instance on a
Kubernetes cluster, configured to launch transcode jobs on the same cluster
in pods created in the same 'plex' namespace.
-
Obtain a Plex Claim Token by visiting plex.tv/claim.
This will be used to bind your new PMS instance to your own user account
automatically. -
Deploy the Helm chart included in this repository using the claim token
obtained in step 1. If you have pre-existing persistent volume claims for your
media, you can specify its name with--set persistence.data.claimName. If not
specified, a persistent volume will be automatically provisioned for you.
➜ helm install plex ./charts/kube-plex \
--namespace plex \
--set claimToken=[insert claim token here] \
--set persistence.data.claimName=existing-pms-data-pvc \
--set ingress.enabled=true
This will deploy a scalable Plex Media Server instance that uses Kubernetes as
a backend for executing transcode jobs.
-
Access the Plex dashboard, either using
kubectl port-forward, or using
the services LoadBalancer IP (viakubectl get service), or alternatively use
the ingress provisioned in the previous step (with--set ingress.enabled=true). -
Visit Settings->Server->Network and add your pod network subnet to the
List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth(near the
bottom). For example,10.100.0.0/16is the subnet that pods in my cluster are
assigned IPs from, so I enter10.100.0.0/16in the box.
You should now be able to play media from your PMS instance - pods will be
created to handle transcodes, and data automatically mounted in appropriately:
➜ kubectl get po -n plex
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
plex-kube-plex-75b96cdcb4-skrxr 1/1 Running 0 14m
pms-elastic-transcoder-7wnqk 1/1 Running 0 8m