Intro to the Problem

Plex reports a new version of the server. The FreeBSD port maintainer has not updated the port yet.

Eventually I’d like to be able to submit patches to help out. But for now, I whipped up a script to do it for me privately.

This is by no means the best solution—it’s just how I’ve chosen to do it until I figure out the “proper way.” I am certain it is by no means the only way to solve the problem.

This post serves to document my quick scratch program and the thought processes behind it (to better understand what I did and what materials I referenced) so I can make changes in the future and improve it. This is just the initial version; there are already changes I am planning on making as this script makes a lot of assumptions about its environment.

NOTE: I plan to place this whole project in a GitHub repository.

API Call to Tautulli - Get Plex Version

The first thing I need to be able to detect in my script is whether a new version of Plex has been released.

There is a notification in Plex; likely there is a way to pull the information directly from the server via an API call. I just chose to use Tautulli and its exposed API. I had just finished setting it up.

The Tautulli API documentation is located at: Tautulli-API-Reference.

The script is written in /usr/bin/env sh, the default shell on FreeBSD. I’m sure it could be ported to many other languages.

Set Script Variables -> place in settings.conf

apikey=yourAPIKEYtoTautulli
cmd=get_pms_update
url=172.16.0.1
port=8181
distfiles=/usr/ports/distfiles
ports_dir=/usr/ports/multimedia/plexmediaserver-plexpass
email=youremail@gmail.com
name=yourname

NOTE: Remember to replace the settings with your own

These variables are set at runtime from a settings.conf, and the script is executed by setting an alias in ~/.cshrc or run directly.

Make the call to the API endpoint using curl, set it as a variable ‘json’.

json=$(curl -s -X GET "http://$url:$port/api/v2?apikey=$apikey&cmd=$cmd

The response comes back from the API endpoint as JSON. It now needs to be parsed for the information needed.

This can be done by piping the JSON through jq, a command-line JSON processor (according to its manual page).

The pieces of information I need to get and set as variables in my script are as follows:

(NOTE: I’m using xargs to make sure there’s no junk or newline characters, etc., floating around—probably not needed, but in a quick and dirty script like this, it eliminates points of failure. Then it can be optimized.)

update_available - A true or false value.

update_available=$(echo $json | jq '.response.data | {update_available}' | jq '.update_available')

download_url - The URL where the new file is located.

download_url=$(echo $json | jq '.response.data | {download_url}' | jq '.download_url' | xargs)

version - The version number separated by a ‘-‘: a ‘prefix’ and a ‘suffix’.

version=$(echo $json | jq '.response.data | {version}' | jq '.version' | xargs)

release_date - The release date.

timestamp=$(echo $json | jq '.response.data | {release_date}' | jq '.release_date' | xargs)

Another bit of information needed is the version prefix and suffix. This can be generated from the version string by splitting it in half using the ‘-‘ as a delimiter and storing each in its own variables for ease of use later.

version_prefix=$(echo $version | cut -f 1 -d '-' | xargs)

version_suffix=$(echo $version | cut -f 2 -d '-' | xargs)

That’s all the information needed, collected into variables and ready to be used in the rest of the script.

The rest of the script can be found in my gist: plex-ports-patch-dirty-logic

NOTE: This script is just a reference. Check out my GitHub for the full version.

The use of aria2c can be toggled on and off in this script by removing the #. Doing so lets me resume broken downloads. Plex servers are usually slow.

make makesum needs to be run to generate the file checksums. It will actually check and download the file if it’s not present in the $distfiles directory.

If your plex server is running inside of a jail managed by cbsd, you can run these commands to kick off the build using synth.

cbsd jexec jname=plex synth install multimedia/plexmediaserver-plexpass
cbsd jexec jname=plex service plexmediaserver_plexpass status
cbsd jexec jname=plex service plexmediaserver_plexpass stop
cbsd jexec jname=plex service plexmediaserver_plexpass start
cbsd jexec jname=plex service plexmediaserver_plexpass status