You may have followed the guide on the plex.tv website and setup a Plex Media Server on CentOS 6 awhile back and now have a working Plex Server for your movies. What do you do when you see that message saying you need to update your Plex Media Server application manually. There are some guides around that do an “ok” job of helping you stumble through the upgrade. The goal of this post is to give you a smooth and easy way to do the upgrade.

While the goal is simplicity, it is impossible for me to know the exact setup of your system. Therefore I cannot guarantee this will always work for you. I have used this method for a few years now and its never given me trouble but I just want you to be warned. Also keep in mind it is a good idea to create backups before trying anything you are unsure of.

Update the Host

Don’t bother trying to update Plex unless you first update your host server:

yum update -y

Reboot if your kernel was upgraded.

Download the latest Plex Media Server Package

You will want to go to the plex.tv website to verify that you’re getting the latest version, but at the time of this writing the following link is for the latest version of the Application. Use wget to download it:

wget https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-media-server/1.0.2.2413-7caf41d/plexmediaserver-1.0.2.2413-7caf41d.x86_64.rpm

Stop the Service

Stop the currently running service:

service plexmediaserver stop

Perform the Upgrade

Use the “localupdate” command which is part of “yum” to do the update. This example uses an asterisk to fill out the rest of the filename so that it is not version specific, but you can also type out the full name of the .rpm file you downloaded in a previous step.

yum localupdate plexmediaserver*

Start the Service

Start the Plex Media Server service again, and check the web interface to verify that the upgrade was a success:

service plexmediaserver start

Done

Congratulations you should now have the latest version of Plex Media Server on your server. As a final note I’ll add that one time I had problems with my Plex Media Server in that the service itself would not stay running. It turned out to be due to the “/” (root) partition  being full. This was because of Plex content library files that were accumulating in /var. I deleted them and Plex automatically re-generated what it needed, and I haven’t had a problem since.