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Authenticating with Plex Pass

Alex Malinovich edited this page Sep 19, 2017 · 4 revisions

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When you tell plexupdate to use Plex Pass releases, we have to authenticate with Plex before checking for downloads to prove that you have a valid Plex Pass account. There are 3 possible steps to this process:

  1. If you've specified a TOKEN line in your /etc/plexupdate.conf, we will use that. Only do this if you have a specific reason to store a token. Option 2 is the preferred way to authenticate.
  2. If you have Plex Media Server installed locally and associated with your Plex Pass account, we will automatically get your token from your local server if possible. This is the default, and the preferred way of authenticating.
  3. If plexupdate can't find your Plex Media Server installation directory, we will attempt to get a token directly from Plex by prompting you for your email address and password. These are only used for fetching the token and will never be written to disk.

Troubleshooting

Double-check your paths

If you have Plex Media Server installed locally but you get prompted for your email password anyway we probably just can't find the token.

By default, plexupdate will check for:

  1. $PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR (if it has been defined in /etc/default/plexmediaserver)
  2. /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/
  3. $HOME/Library/Application Support/

If we find the folder we will try to look for Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml inside of it and extract your token from there.

Be sure your server is claimed

If you know that your Plex Media Server is installed in one of those 3 locations then it is possible that your server just hasn't been claimed properly. Access your server through the web UI, click on your profile icon in the top right and click "Sign Out". Then log in again and try plexupdate again.

Manually fetch your token

Finally, you can manually retrieve your token using your email and password and then store it in your /etc/plexupdate.conf. The easiest way to do this is to just run extras/installer.sh from your installation directory. Alternatively, you can manually fetch your token by doing the following:

cd <your plexupdate installation folder>
bash -c 'source plexupdate-core' get-plex-token

Once you have your token, just edit /etc/plexupdate.conf and add a line that reads TOKEN=<your token here>.

If you continue to have trouble, please open an issue.