Plex Auto-Collections

This is a simple script to automatically create collections by matching the titles of movies in your library with movies in the collections.yml file or a custom collections file.

This script was originally based off of an inspired by this script, so thanks to AustinHasten for that!

Installation

Simply use pip to install the requirements and run the software with python 3.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Simply run the script:

python3 main.py

It will ask you for your Plex login and automatically find your servers. If it looks like more than one library may contain movies, it will ask you which one you want to create collections on. This also uses the standard PlexAPI standard config options of reading authentication information from the plexapi config file.

You can also set the environment variables PLEX_URL and PLEX_TOKEN for authentication.

Collection Files

Since this was designed to run against any arbitrary Plex movie library (and some people may have different naming conventions for movies), I decided that regular expression matching would be best for most cases.

Example: ^Star Wars(.*?A New Hope|.*?Episode (?:4|IV))?$ will match all of the following that could be the first (chronoligically) Star Wars movie (and more):

• Star Wars
• Star Wars: A New Hope
• Star Wars: Episode 4
• Star Wars: Episode IV

If you want to customize collection names or the names of movies found in your library, simply edit or replace the included collections.yml file.

Custom collections

An alternate method to add additional collections is via the collections.d directory. Files contained within this directory, ending with the suffix .yml, will automatically be loaded/processed after collections.yml. The format of each xxxxx.yml file is identical to that of collections.yml. Additionally, one may disable any custom collection by simply renaming the file (e.g. xxxxx.yml.disabled).

Best practices

When determining whether to put a new collection in collections.yml or collections.d, please keep the following best practices in mind:

• Any collection may reside in a custom collection.
• A collection longer than about 10 lines in length should be placed in its own custom collection.
• A collection longer than about 50 lines in length should be placed in its own custom collection, and be disabled by default (e.g. my_collection.yml.disabled).

Examples

Command	Resulting action
python main.py	process collections.yml plus any custom collections named collections.d/*.yml
./main.py	same as above
DEBUG=1 ./main.py	same as above & display debugging output
./main.py --library 'Old Movies'	process above named collections without being prompted to select the library (useful within crontab)
`./main.py --help	show 'help'
./main.py collections.yml	process only collections.yml
./main.py collections.yml collections.d/my_collection.yml	process collections.yml & the custom collection collections.d/my_collection.yml
./main.py collections.d/my_collection.yml collections.d/hallmark.yml.disabled	process only the custom collections collections.d/my_collection.yml & collections.d/hallmark.yml.disabled

NOTE: when supplying custom collection filenames via the command line, one may also include custom collections that have been disabled.

Posters

A great resource for posters can be found in this reddit thread.

Contributing

I wrote this with the hope that the community would help expand and include more collections and help make any corrections in better matching movies in various libraries. Pull requests are very much welcome!