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Soon after setting up Plex using these instructions, I was informed that Plex had an update available. In the Windows world, I would just choose to update within the Plex interface and everything would be taken care of. On the NAS, however, that does not occur. So, I did some reading and used Docker to perform the update, however, after it finished and restarted, the previous container was deleted and a new one added. As a result, I had to re-claim my Plex server and re-configure the media folders within Plex along with my settings. I do have a /Data and /Configure folder on my NAS to where that information should be saved. I did see something indicating that if I stopped the container and restarted, it would automatically update to the latest version. Can you confirm this and if not, how can I perform Plex updates without having to go through a re-configuration each time. Thank you!
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Thanks for reaching out and explaining what happened. This is a really common point of confusion when running Plex in Docker, and it sounds like you’ve already set yourself up with the right idea by using mapped /config and /data folders.
To clarify, the key to updating Plex in Docker without losing your claimed server and settings is making sure that your /config path (where Plex stores all its metadata, library database, settings, and claim info) is persistent and correctly mapped to a folder on your NAS storage, outside of the container. From your message, it seems you already have a /Configure folder for this purpose — just double-check that it is the one actually mounted to /config in your container definition.
When you redeploy or update the container, Plex itself sees the persistent /config and continues where it left off. If you update by completely deleting the container and not re-mapping /config, you’ll lose everything and have to re-claim.
So here is the best practice:
• Always use a persistent /config mount pointing to your NAS.
• Stop the container.
• Pull the updated Plex image from Docker Hub.
• Start a new container using the same /config and /data mounts as before.
If you’re using docker run commands, keep the same volume mounts. If you’re using docker-compose, it’s even easier — just do docker-compose pull and docker-compose up -d, and the updated image will start with your existing configuration intact.
To answer your specific question: no, simply stopping and starting the container does not update Plex. You need to pull the updated image and restart it. But as long as the /config folder is properly mapped and kept, your server will come back exactly as before.
