Plex Toolkit

What it is

A self-hosted companion for Plex Media Server. You run one Docker container, sign in with your Plex account, and install whichever tools you want from inside the app. Each one does a single job that Plex doesn’t do on its own.

Why it exists

Plex does the main job really well, but there’s a handful of things I kept wishing it did. I wanted cinema-style idents before a film, a heads-up when an actor I like turns up on Freeview, and Continue Watching that doesn’t fall apart the moment you rewatch a series. Rather than a pile of separate scripts, each with its own config and cron job, it made more sense to build one place to run them all.

What’s in it

• Plex Notifier ranks your most-watched actors and directors, lets you track favourites, and emails you when they or anything on your watchlist airs on Freeview. It can also set the recording up for you through Plex DVR, which is where the £5 Xbox tuner earns its keep.
• Preroll Scheduler plays cinema idents and trailers before films. You set up buckets of videos and schedules by date, so Halloween and Christmas get their own prerolls without anyone remembering to swap them over.
• Netflix Rewatch fixes Continue Watching for rewatches. When you start a series again, it marks the following episodes as unwatched so the next one actually shows up in the Continue Watching row.
• Letterboxd Watchlist Sync copies a public Letterboxd watchlist into your Plex watchlist.
• Scheduled Recommendations picks films based on your Letterboxd ratings and puts them in a Plex collection or playlist, or emails them to you. Handy for “what shall we watch tonight” with an age rating cap on family nights.
• Trailer Fetcher handles downloading new trailers.

Technical decisions

• One container and one .env file. Anyone who can run Docker on a NAS or a home server should be able to get it going without reading half the internet first.
• Tools are plugins that ship inside the image. You install and enable the ones you want, and anything that didn’t come from the image gets removed on start, so nobody can sneak extra code in through the data folder.
• Signing in uses the normal Plex login flow rather than asking people to dig their Plex token out by hand, and the token is encrypted at rest.
• Playback events come over the Plex websocket, so it works without Plex Pass. Webhooks are optional and only add scrobble events if you have it.
• Shared settings for email and the TMDb API key, so you set them up once rather than in every tool.
• One-click updates from the home screen, but only if you opt in by giving it access to the Docker socket. If you’d rather it couldn’t touch Docker at all, you can leave that out and update by hand.

Status

Up on GitHub and running on my own media server. New tools get added as I find more things Plex doesn’t do.