Plex Media Server is a great solution to organize all of your media and access them from your laptop, phone, TV, or lots of other places. It’s easy to listen to your music or watch your movies via Plex when you’re at home and connected to your home network. But what about when you are away on vacation, or if you want to share access to your library with friends and family?

Plex remote access not working?

Plex offers a remote access feature that relies on port forwarding, but the configuration may not always work or there may be other common issues like Double-NAT, resulting in an error like the screenshot below.

Using port forwarding also exposes an open port to your home network that can potentially be exploited. For mobile access, Plex provides mobile apps, but without a paid subscription, video and music streaming is limited to 1 minute and photos are watermarked.

There are other common approaches, but as the table below illustrates, they are cumbersome, insecure, and potentially expensive. We are excited to offer a new simple, secure, and free solution: . In this guide, we’ll focus on Windows and walk you through the steps to setup Twingate to access your Windows Plex Media Server from anywhere.

Please also join us in our .

Install WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets you run a Linux environment on your Windows PC and is required to set up Twingate. Fortunately, it can be installed by running just a single command.

First, open up Command Prompt or PowerShell as an Administrator. Type command prompt in the Windows start menu search box and click on “Run as administrator”, as shown in the screenshot below.

In the Command Prompt window that pops up, simply type in wsl --install and press Enter. After some time, the installation will automatically complete and Ubuntu will now be installed.

If you run into any issues, please also refer to Microsoft’s detailed instructions and open the Docker Desktop Installer.exe file to start the wizard.

On the Configuration screen, make sure that “Install required Windows components for WSL 2” is checked.

Follow the rest of the installation wizard. After completion, open the Docker Desktop application and you should see a screen like this. We will come back to Docker later on.

Sign up for Twingate

Twingate Starter is a new free plan that is designed for home and personal use. If you don’t have an account already, please click . Type in the Twingate Network URL that you chose when you signed up and tap “Join Network”. You’ll be automatically asked to log in using the same account you used to sign up. After signing in, you’ll land on the home screen, where you should already see your Plex Resource listed. When you are connected to your Twingate network, a “VPN” icon will appear in the top bar of your screen.

To test it out, stay connected to Twingate, disconnect from your local network (e.g., by disabling WiFi), and navigate to your Plex Media Server instance on your phone’s browser. You should be able to access it just as if you were at home.

Finally, disconnect from Twingate and try accessing Plex again — you should see that it’s inaccessible.

Congrats! You’ve finished setting up Twingate for Plex Media Server. Join us in the community forum to share how things went and what cool use cases you’ve discovered!

Sharing is Caring

Do you want to share access with a family member? You can easily do this from the Twingate web UI. Just go to the Team tab and click “Invite User” to send an email invitation. The recipient would simply follow the same steps to download the Twingate client, join your network, and get access to Plex, or any other resource you set up!