I found this app shortly after getting my first echo dot this past christmas and was saddened to see the project abandoned. There is a live thread on the plex community, where no one has heard any updates in about a year. I figured I'd at least try to get this old code working and after a week or two (one to learn node.js, and one to debug the changes in the past year to the different api's) I was able to make it work. This is my attempt at sharing my findings, and hopefully enabling others to be able to access the awesome functionality.
Overall, I found the following issues with the original code: 1. Amazon Echo no longer requires a prefix to the id 2. [OBJECT]._children doesn't seem to work anymore, not sure why, this is likely due to the response? I had to replace it with object literals(is that the right word?) 3. The biggest issue: plex doesn't seem to allow you to request the server to initiate playback on clients anymore, instead you have to post the http request to the CLIENT with the content key and server machine id to get the media from
Good Luck Russ
OverloadUT's original Readme below:
Great news for Plex and Amazon Echo fans alike!! I am going to be working directly with Plex to make an official Alexa Plex skill, which will be totally streets ahead.
Stay tuned to Plex's official channels for more!
The final state of this public project will remain here for people to learn from, but no further development should be expected.
(original readme follows)
Alexa (Amazon Echo) app for interacting with a Plex Server and controlling client playback
This page is for developers that want to help develop the app. If you want to USE the app, check out this page: https://overloadut.github.io/alexa-plex/
Development is being tracked on Waffle.io: https://waffle.io/OverloadUT/alexa-plex
Here's an early proof-of-concept video
npm installto install all dependenciesnpm testto verify that all tests are passing. If they are, you're ready to rock!
The app is meant to be deployed as an AWS Lambda function. Setting that up is beyond the scope of this readme though. There's a deploy.bat file in this project that will deploy to AWS Lambda if you're on Windows, but you will need to have the AWS toolkit installed and configured, and have an "alexa-plex" function set up.
This app requires DynamoDB. You'll need to get that set up and create a table named AlexaPlexUsers with a primary string key of userid
You need to define a few environment variables to tell this app how to talk to your Plex server. The project is set up to use dotenv so you can simply create a .env file in the project root to define all of the needed variables. Here's a template:
APP_PRODUCT=Alexa Plex
APP_VERSION=2.0
APP_DEVICE=Amazon Echo
APP_DEVICE_NAME=Alexa
APP_IDENTIFIER=(generate a UUID for your app)
ALEXA_APP_ID=(create an alexa app and put the app ID here)
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=(you need AWS credentials here that has read and write access to a DynamoDB table)
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=(you need AWS credentials here that has read and write access to a DynamoDB table)