2.9 KiB
Plex on Kubernetes
This project runs the existing Plex server as a single high-performance Pod on
arschrock in its dedicated plex namespace. It is intentionally not highly
available and can never fail over to an ODROID. CPU and memory have scheduling
requests but no limits.
The 500 TB media tree stays on the host and is mounted read-only from
/komposthaufen/multimedia. The Pod also requires the existing Videos
directory and an init container verifies that the path is backed by bcachefs.
If the encrypted filesystem has not been unlocked and mounted, Plex does not
start. The Deployment also requires the explicit
media.brunner.ninja/multimedia-ready=true node label. The shared
../media-storage-offline.sh helper removes it and stops the media Pods before
unmounting; ../media-storage-online.sh validates the mount before restoring
the label.
Persistent Plex configuration, metadata, preview images, and SQLite databases
live on the retained 160 GiB plex-config RBD PVC. Transcodes use node-local
ephemeral storage. The official Plex image is pinned to the same version as the
migrated Arch installation.
Historical migration
The one-time Arch-to-Kubernetes copy tooling is preserved in Git history, not
as an active deployment path. The existing plex-config PVC must not be
deleted or recreated during upgrades. Routine deployment is owned by Argo CD.
Plex remains available at
https://plex.brunner.ninja and directly on 192.168.0.2:32400.
Monitoring
The Pod contains a rootless Plex exporter. Its token is read from the migrated
Preferences.xml into a memory-backed volume; it is not duplicated in a
Kubernetes Secret or environment variable. A ServiceMonitor and alerts cover
the exporter, Plex API access, restart loops, and PVC capacity. Existing
Tautulli, node-exporter, Netdata, SMART, and bcachefs monitoring remain in use.
Helm and GitOps
This repository owns the Plex chart: Deployment, Service, media guard,
exporter, ingress option, and monitoring. The chart preserves the existing
Deployment selector used by media-storage-offline.sh and
media-storage-online.sh. The homelab's node pin, guarded hostPath, existing
PVC, public host and resource requests are selected in the
GitOps values.
helm repo add brunner.ninja https://brunner.ninja/charts
helm repo update brunner.ninja
helm upgrade --install plex brunner.ninja/plex --namespace plex --create-namespace
To install this checkout manually, run ./install.sh -f my-values.yaml with
the target namespace and media mount configured. Main-branch CI validates,
publishes the chart using the upstream application Git tag plus git describe,
then promotes its exact version to GitOps. CI needs PACKAGE_USERNAME,
PACKAGE_TOKEN, and GITOPS_TOKEN, but no kubeconfig. The Plex image is the
official upstream image and is selected by Chart.yaml.appVersion.