Archived - I no longer use Plex

A small Python script to trash unavailable files on Plex. Although Plex does this automatically, it does not check for if the remote mount is active. Therefore having it on has the possibility of completely wiping out all of the metadata if the mount link ever breaks.

This piece of code is tailored to be used with rclone and MergerFS, although the idea is the same for other types of remote mount.

Ensure that python3 and pip are installed on the machine. This script depends on two external libraries,

pip install plexapi
pip install discord-webhook

Create an anchor file on the remote mount. For instance, anchor.lock was placed in the root of the remote for this script development.

The following variables needs to be set for the script to work,

• baseurl: The URL of the Plex server (SSL is recommended here)
• token: Obtained by viewing the XML of a media and taking the token off of the URL
• anchorPath: File name and location of the anchor file on the mount/merged folder (suggested to use the merged folder)
• DiscordWebhookURL: A Discord webhook URL, can be left blank too
• DiscordUserID: Discord account's ID (used to ping the user), can be left blank too

To run the script from shell,

chmod +x AutoTrash.py
./AutoTrash.py

usage: AutoTrash.py [-h] [-s] [-q]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  -s, --shell  Invoke a shell, used for cron (default: False)
  -q, --quiet  Suppress Discord notification on success (default: False)

This is the recommended way of setting this up. For instance, this is how it is setup to run every 15 minutes. crontab.guru can be used to easily obtain the necessary interval.

*/15 * * * * /home/username/AutoTrash.py -s >> /dev/null 2>&1

Ensure the use of -s or --shell, as the shell=True flag needs to be used during the subprocess.call

This is due to the use of --user flag with the systemctl command. The script needs to run the command in a shell to have access to the right environmental variables. Otherwise, the following error will be displayed,

Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory

The -q or --quiet flag can be used to stop Discord messages going through for when the script works properly. Only the errors will be sent to Discord.

The following image shows the Discord embed working, the first log is when the trash was cleared due to remote mount availability, and the second log did not clear the trash due to lack of an anchor file and PMS being offline.