Questions about the Plex snap

snap
1

Hi, I usually run Emby on my laptop ( I don’t have it autostarted for this reason, I only start it sometimes when I want to watch media on another device because it’s my laptop ) and I wanted to try Plex to test it. I noticed there’s a Plex snap. However I have questions.

  1. Why does the Plex snap running as root? Isn’t it supposed to be confined? Should I be concerned? Is this unsafe? If I install the Plex DEB from plex’s website it runs as “plex” user, not root.

  2. The main reason I’m using the plex deb vs the snap (other than the snap running as root), is that I have the ability to disable autostart for the deb with “sudo systemctl disable plexmediaserver” and if I want to start it I can run “sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver”. Why can’t I do this for the snap? Also, the ability to move the cache directory to another drive is a must, which I don’t know if you can do with the snap.

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2

Check out https://docs.snapcraft.io/t/service-management/3965

3

I don’t see anything about permanently disabling it on startup.

And more importantly,

What about the whole running as root thing? Isn’t that bad practice? Why claim that your snap is “secure” or “confined” when it literally has godmode over the entire system, or is it still sandboxed in a way?

4

See the end of the “Starting and stopping services” section of the service-management doc.

You can also snap disable plexmediaserver to disable the snap altogether - and snap enable plexmediaserver again to bring it back up.

As for running as root, it’s fine because it’s all confined using other techniques. That said, there’s plans to add user/group support, see the discussion here.

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