In my opinion, this is the best Plexamp Discord RPC solution for the following reasons:
- Images don't require third party service. Other solutions force you to use lastfm (to lookup the album and serve the image, in my case I listen to a lot of things not found on this and similar platforms, so this media would simply be missing), or imgur/other filesharing site (to upload album art to the internet to be served to Discord, which adds delays, and can add up to a lot of wasted upload bandwidth, which is limited in my situation). With this solution, images are shared quickly and securely, and is by far the most simple way of going about this problem.
- Can be used on a server. This means I can listen on my phone, or in my car, or on my homepod, and no matter where I am, the status can still be shared through the RPC (as long as the Plex server, and Discord are running). This flexibility is unparalleled.
- Recently developed, professionally made, and maintained. Other options are very old, may not work, or have long-standing issues.
- First, you will need to proxy your Plex server. For this, I am using Cloudflare tunnels (only for API routes, explained below), as this provides easy setup with little to no configuration. Read below on how to setup Cloudflare Tunnels for this purpose. This is necessary for images, as they need to be publicly accessible.
- Once your Plex server is proxied, enter your details into
config.example.json. This includes your new proxied Plex server URL as "public_plex_url". - Copy this config to
config.jsonwherever your service is running on your device. - Run the service, and press play on Plexamp!
While streaming video through Cloudflare tunnels isn't allowed, using the Plex internal API to be exposed publicly is. Go to https://one.dash.cloudflare.com and login to your Cloudflare account or create a new account. Go to Networks -> Tunnels and click the button labeled, "Create a tunnel". Follow the instructions to install to your machine. When asked to publish an application route, make sure your domain is on your Cloudflare account and create a URL. While you don't have to use Cloudflare tunnels, using something like Nginx, will have all of these same configuration options available.
For subdomain, I used plex but you can put anything.
For domain, pick your domain.
For path, use library/metadata. This is necessary to prevent people from publicly accessing your Plex server, since this is necessary for Discord to see it, as well as the service exposing your X-Plex-Token. DO NOT MISS THIS STEP.
For service, choose type, HTTPS, and point URL to your internal IP of your Plex server. Mine is 127.0.0.1:32400.
Under "Additional application settings" go to TLS and enable No TLS Verify. This is necessary as Plex runs on HTTPS, but doesn't have a signed certificate (unless you explicitly added one).
It should look like the following:
Since we use the "X-Plex-Token" to retrieve metadata publicly, we need to make sure the Plex server is locked down properly to prevent unauthorized access. As mentioned, we only want to expose the library/metadata path, but since there are also other calls that can affect the Plex server negatively in this namespace, we need to make sure that only GET, OPTIONS and HEAD requests are allowed through. If this isn't done properly, The Plex URL and X-Plex-Token can be used to delete content that you play by deriving the URL and library ID from the public URL we expose to Discord. This would only be a deliberate attack, but we want to prevent it either way.
If using Cloudflare, set up a custom security rule, by going to Security -> Security Rules and click the button labeled "Create rule". Name this rule whatever you want, but we need to enter the rule as follows:
When incoming requests match...
Request method, does not equal GET, AND Request method, does not equal HEAD, AND Request method, does not equal OPTIONS, AND Hostname, equals (previously set public domain name, mine is plex.domain.com)
Then take action, Block.
It should look like the following:
There are 2 ways of running this service. One way is locally on your device, it will start and stop whenever you boot up your computer. The other way is running this in a Docker compose using kasmweb/discord Docker container, to connect the 2 together.
This application is only compatible with Unix devices. Windows has a different socket communication process that is not built into this service. If running on Windows, use the Docker method of installation and running.
If you are receiving this error, it is likely due to you missing the proper permissions on your Discord account. Make sure this option below is enabled.
