Why not use Nginx?

[shadycuz]

My plan was just to spin up several servers all with Ansible and just have them be individual but all linked back to my single Plex account and all share the same media. That way I can use Nginx with iphash balancing to distribute the load. Why did you decide to do it the way you did? I currently have 1 server at home and 1 in the cloud and no matter which one I navigate to in my browser I can act on either server as if I'm on that server (change settings, play media).

Thanks,
Levi

[reallistic]

@shadycuz Nginx would be a much better way to go. The code in here could probably even be a nginx module.

Originally when I made this I was only really familiar with PHP and Apache. So that was really the only reason I chose those two.

This project (when acting as a load balancer) would make it so that Plex only knows about 1 server. That server would be the load balancer which would proxy traffic to multiple other servers.

For example, if you had say 1000 people you wanted to share your plex library with, you could use plex web to manage shares for a single server but use this project to load balance to say 10 servers. With load balancing, you could do things like dynamically increase/decrease the number of servers in the pool without plex ever knowing.

[shadycuz]

Hey,

Thanks for getting back with me. I currently load balance and failover with Nginx so I will go that route. I don't have a lot of users (just me) but I do got crappy hosting (dirt cheap) and need to re-standup servers often. When I get it up and tested I will comeback and post my ansible playbook to stand up plex and my Nginx config.

Thanks,
Levi.

[barbequesauce]

Hi -
Looking to do something similar here, load-balancing with nginx between two RPi's running PMS and a shared filesystem. Are you still willing to post your nginx config?

Thanks in advance.

[shadycuz]

@barbequesauce Read this http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html , you will want to use IP hash load balancing.

upstream plex {

        server myip:myport;  #You can also use hostnames
        server mysecondpi:port #Multiple servers can be defined
}

server {
        listen 80; # I listen on both ports and redirect to 443 but I'm using TLS

        server_name mydomain.com;  #The address people will be going to get to your site.
        location /robots.txt { return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n"; } # I dont allow robots

        location /.well-known {  #This is for my TLS certs.
                alias /var/www/letsencrypt/html/.well-known;
                allow all;
                autoindex on;
        }
        #return 301 https://$host/web/index.html; #this needs removed I guess its commented out
        location / {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri; # The redirect to https
}
}

server {

        listen 443 ssl http2; # I like to use new stuff, hence the http2

        server_name mydomain.com;

        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/xxxxx/fullchain.pem; #My TLS stuff, you wont need.
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/xxxxxx/privkey.pem;
       # All This SSL stuff is just to be super secure 
        ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;
        ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';
        ssl_session_timeout 1d;
        ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:50m;
        ssl_stapling on;
        ssl_stapling_verify on;
        add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;

        location /robots.txt { return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n"; }
        # this is where everything cool happens
        location / {
    if ($args ~ (.*)X-Plex-Device(.*)) {
        proxy_pass http://plex;
    }

    if ($http_referer ~ (.*)plex(.*)) {
        proxy_pass http://plex;
    }
        proxy_pass http://plex/web/index.html;
}

location ~ ^/(\?(?:.*)(X-Plex-Device=)|web|video|photo|library|web|status|system|updater|clients|:|playQueues)(.*) {
    proxy_pass http://plex;
    proxy_redirect  http://plex /;
    # set some headers and proxy stuff.
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_redirect off;

    # include Host header
    proxy_set_header Host $host;

    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_read_timeout 36000s;
    proxy_pass_request_headers on;
}
location /plex {
    error_log /var/log/nginx/plex.error.log debug;
    rewrite_log on;
    rewrite ^/plex(.*)$ /web$1 break;
    proxy_pass http://plex;
    proxy_headers_hash_max_size 51200;
    proxy_headers_hash_bucket_size 6400;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-for $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_read_timeout 36000s;
    proxy_pass_request_headers on;
}
        location /.well-known {
                alias /var/www/letsencrypt/html/.well-known;
                allow all;
                autoindex on;
        }
}

The bottom looks confusing but what is does is lets a user go to mydomain.com and use plex with nothing in the trailing url. so xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:32400/web/index.html is now just mydomain.com