{"id":313,"date":"2025-12-18T15:15:38","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T15:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niklouch.com\/blog\/?p=313"},"modified":"2025-12-18T15:36:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T15:36:39","slug":"plex-api-quickstart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niklouch.com\/blog\/plex-api-quickstart\/","title":{"rendered":"Plex API Quickstart"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been running Plex <\/a>for a few years now, and while I’m fully aware that there are potentially more preferred server applications<\/a> available (due to technology stack, cost, etc), I still consider Plex my go-to, especially as I share with tech-illiterate friends\/family. It basically hosts my photos, family videos, DVD rips – and does it well, with a clean interface, native apps and decent transcoding. And here’s where the inner geek gets involved – it has a pretty decent API also!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few friends have recently setup similar systems and we got onto the discussion of using the API to query your local server to get stats, details of who is watching what, what’s available, recent uploads – all very much documented by people more educated on the subject than I am<\/a> and all absolutely informing the lessons I learned from ChatGPT<\/a>. So I’m not going to pretend that this is any sort of “How To<\/em>“, but rather “Here’s how I’m doing it<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Querying your local server is really easy, and authentication relies only upon an access token – however, to get that access token, you need to query the cloud API – which annoyingly relies upon email and password – ugh. So, what I’ve done is the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n