plex-axi

Search a Plex music library field by field, from a command line built for agents. Every value gets its own flag — artist, track, genre, mood, year, minimum rating — and Plex evaluates the whole predicate server-side. Every answer ends at a labelled media_id, the identifier you hand to whatever plays music where you are.

It does not play anything unless you switch playback on, and until you do it has no play command at all. Out of the box the tool stops at the identifier, and dispatch belongs to whatever already owns your speakers — which is the right answer if you run Home Assistant or anything like it, since two things that can both start music means two things that disagree about what is playing. If you have Plex and nothing else, that was a dead end, so PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_PLAYBACK=true adds two commands: clients, which lists what can play, and play, which starts one track, album, artist or playlist on one of them. Without that variable they are not refused — they do not exist, in the help, in the skill or in the command table, so an agent cannot pick a path you did not open. There is no pause, stop, volume or queue command in either case, and there is not going to be one.

It is an AXI tool — an Agent eXperience Interface, a convention for command lines whose primary user is an LLM agent rather than a person. In practice that means token-efficient structured output (TOON rather than JSON), no interactive prompts, a non-zero exit on every failure, and errors that carry the command which fixes them. It reads perfectly well in a terminal — --human prints aligned tables — it is simply not optimised for one.

Why per-field search

Every published Plex CLI, MCP server and LLM wrapper takes a single free-text query string and hands it to the server as one blob — which is why searching for an artist and a song title reliably returns nothing. plex-axi gives each value its own flag and each flag its own Plex field, and lets Plex evaluate the whole predicate server-side.

$ plex-axi search --artist "Example Artist" --track "Example Track"
count: 1 of 1 total
grouped: title
filters[2]{field,operator,value}:
  artist.title,contains,Example Artist
  track.title,contains,Example Track
tracks[1]{key,media_id,title,artist,album}:
  111,"plex://<machineIdentifier>/111",Example Track,Example Artist,Example Album
item:
  media_id: "plex://<machineIdentifier>/111"
  rating_key: 111
  guid: "plex://track/a1b2c3d4e5f60718293c0111"
  note: "rating_key is local to this server and changes when an item is re-matched or the library is rebuilt; guid is the identifier that survives, so keep them together"

It also exposes the parts of Plex's music surface that nothing else does: the library's own genre, mood and style vocabularies; sonic similarity with the server's own distance; the music-analysis version behind an empty "more like this"; and, behind a flag, whether the server can actually read the file.

What it hands back is an identifier, and that is the end of it. What a media_id is and what accepts one is below; why the tool refuses the step after it, and the test that holds the line, are in AGENTS.md.

Two commands can change your library, and neither runs by accident. rate sets the rating that --rated-min reads, and playlist edits an audio playlist. Both are refused unless the operator has exported PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_WRITES=true, and even then they preview the change and send nothing until --write is passed. Every other command reads. See Writing.

Install

pipx install plex-axi        # or: uv tool install plex-axi

Or run it without installing:

uvx plex-axi search --artist "Example Artist"
pipx run plex-axi genres

Configure

Both values come from the environment. There is no --token flag and no credential file: a token on a command line leaks into shell history and the process table, and a Plex token is a bearer credential for an entire library.

export PLEX_URL=http://plex.example.com:32400   # the server on your local network
export PLEX_TOKEN=<a Plex access token>
export PLEX_SECTION='Example Music'             # only if the server has more than one
export PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_WRITES=true               # only if `rate` and `playlist` may write
export PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_PLAYBACK=true             # only if you want `clients` and `play` to exist
export PLEX_ACCOUNT_TOKEN=<a plex.tv token>     # only to reach Sonos speakers; see Playback

Point PLEX_URL at the server itself rather than at plex.tv, so the tool keeps working when plex.tv is unreachable and no invocation pays a cloud round-trip. Finding a token is documented at https://support.plex.tv/articles/204059436.

plex-axi doctor    # exits non-zero when any check fails, so it works as a hook or CI gate

Use

plex-axi                                              # the library at a glance
plex-axi search --artist "Example Artist" --rated-min 4
plex-axi search --genre Jazz --type album --limit 10
plex-axi pick --rated-min 4 --not-played-since 30d --exclude-live
plex-axi genres                                       # and `moods`, `styles`
plex-axi track 12345 --check-files
plex-axi similar 12345 --max-distance 0.1
plex-axi recent
plex-axi playlist show "Example Playlist"
plex-axi sessions
plex-axi api /library/sections                        # the escape hatch, GET only

Every command takes --help, which is the authoritative reference for its flags — including an access: line under the description saying whether that command reads, writes or starts playback.

pick is the "give me something to listen to" command. Every one of its filters is a Plex predicate the server evaluates — the rating comparison, the genre, the relative date, the compilation/live exclusion — and the shuffle is Plex's own sort=random over the whole match set rather than a shuffle of one page. A filter this particular server does not offer is reported under unapplied rather than quietly applied in Python, because a client-side filter fights --limit exactly as it fights Plex's own limit.

Reading as another account

Ratings and playlists are per account, so --user <plex-username> answers the same questions for somebody else on the server:

plex-axi --user example-friend playlist

It is admin only — the per-user tokens are the owner's to read — and it is the one flag here that needs a round-trip to plex.tv, because the mapping from a username to that user's token for this server exists nowhere else. Everything else keeps working with plex.tv down, and a failure here says which of the two happened rather than arriving as an unexplained 401.

Output format

Structured TOON on stdout by default — Token-Oriented Object Notation, a compact encoding of the same data JSON would carry, roughly 40% cheaper in tokens. A header names the columns once and each row is one line:

count: 2 of 47 total
tracks[2]{key,media_id,title,artist,album}:
  111,"plex://a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f8a9b0/111",Example Track,Example Artist,Example Album
  112,"plex://a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f8a9b0/112",Second Example,Example Artist,Example Album

• --human renders aligned tables for a person.
• --json emits raw JSON, for anything that would rather parse than read.
• Errors go to stdout too, in the same structured shape, and carry the command that fixes them, so a wrong flag corrects itself in one turn. stderr carries only diagnostics (--debug), which agents do not read.
• Exit codes: 0 success — including a search that matched nothing, because an empty answer is an answer; 1 the outcome of a lookup against live state (nothing at that rating key, no music library on the server, an ambiguous section); 2 a usage error (unknown command, unknown flag, a rating key that is not a number, a write method on api).
• Unknown flags and extra arguments are rejected by name rather than ignored, with that subcommand's valid flags listed inline so the correction takes one turn, not two.

One documented deviation: help[N]: blocks render one suggestion per line rather than as a delimiter-joined TOON array. Suggestions are command lines that routinely contain commas, and this is the shape the AXI standard and the sibling AXI CLIs use. Every data structure is strict TOON, and "strict" is a test result rather than a claim: the specification's own conformance fixtures are vendored into the suite and every one of them has to pass.

Rules of thumb

• Use a flag per field. --artist X --track Y searches two Plex fields; --query "X Y" searches one string. --query exists for the case where there genuinely is only one unstructured string, and its --help says so.
• Ratings are stars, 0–5, in both directions. A rating printed in a result can be passed straight back to --rated-min.
• Genres and styles live on the artist, not the track — that is how Plex tags a music library. plex-axi genres prints the exact strings the server will accept; pass one of those, not a synonym.
• A zero result is an answer. It names the filters that matched nothing and the command that lists the real vocabulary.
• Every row carries a media_id. That is what the tool is for: a labelled identifier a media consumer accepts, on every row of every list, so nothing needs a follow-up call to be usable.
• --fields replaces the default columns, it does not add to them. The default set is a suggestion and may grow a column when the data warrants one (track_artist on a compilation), so name the columns if you need a fixed schema.
• --rated-min is a minimum in stars, and 0 is not a filter. Zero is the bottom of the scale and narrows nothing; --rated-min 0.5 is what asks for everything that carries a rating at all.
• rating_key is local to one server and moves when an item is re-matched or the library is rebuilt. Keep the guid beside it anywhere the value is written down — unless the guid reads local://<rating_key>, which is what Plex gives an item it never matched to its catalogue. That one is the rating key with a scheme in front of it, so it moves with it; the detail view says so rather than promising otherwise, and there is nothing durable to write down for those items.
• A mutating command without --write is a useful command, not a nag. It prints exactly what would change and sends nothing, which is how to check a playlist edit before making it — and how a smart playlist is caught before the server would refuse it.

Writing

plex-axi began as a read-only tool and most of it still is. Two commands are not:

Both are behind the same two-part gate, and the order matters:

1. PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_WRITES=true in the environment. This is the gate. It is a variable rather than a flag because of who sets it: the operator, once, outside the invocation. Something composing a command line cannot grant itself a permission it was not given, and the refusal names what to set. With it unset, a mutating command never contacts the server at all — the check runs before the connection is opened, so the attempt is not even something the server hears about.
2. --write on the invocation. Without it the command still runs: it reads the item or the playlist, prints the change it would make, and sends nothing.

$ plex-axi rate 12345 --stars 5
error: "refusing to rate 12345: writes are disabled (PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_WRITES is not set)"
code: WRITES_DISABLED
help[3]:
  Run `export PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_WRITES=true`, then run the command again with --write
  ...

plex-axi api stays GET only whatever the gate says. A raw path that could POST would make the gate meaningless — anything a typed command refused could be reissued by hand — and several Plex write endpoints are destructive.

There is still no metadata editing and no server administration, and no transport control: play starts one thing on one target and nothing in this tool can pause, skip or stop it.

Playback

Off by default, and while it is off the commands are not there to be found — not in --help, not in the generated skill, not in the no-argument view. That is deliberate, and the default is the important half.

If you run Home Assistant, or anything else that already dispatches music, leave this switched off. Your automation owns the speakers — Sonos included, which it reaches by its own path — and the shape that works is to use this tool to find music and let that system play it. A play issued here goes around it, so its state is stale the moment the command succeeds; the problem is not that nothing happens, it is that everything downstream is confidently wrong about what is playing. While the switch is off an agent cannot see this path at all, which is the only reliable way to stop it choosing one.

Switch it on if you have Plex and nothing else doing that job — which is exactly who it is for, because without it the tool hands you an identifier and stops.

export PLEX_AXI_ALLOW_PLAYBACK=true

plex-axi clients                                        # what can actually play
plex-axi play 12345 --client 'Living Room'              # says what it would do, sends nothing
plex-axi play 12345 --client 'Living Room' --now        # starts it

The gate is an environment variable and --now is the confirmation, exactly as with writes: the variable is your standing decision, the flag is this invocation's. Leaving --now off is not a nag, it is a cheaper question — it resolves the item and the target and tells you which one it picked and why, which is where "I have three clients and named none of them" gets caught before a speaker comes on. If there is exactly one target it is used, and the answer says it was the only candidate.

clients lists only targets that advertise Plex's playback capability; anything else that answered is counted, because a client that cannot play will accept the command and do nothing. No network address is printed for any target — --client takes the exact title, or the machine_id printed beside it when two targets share a name.

Two routes, and the second has conditions:

PLEX_ACCOUNT_TOKEN is a plex.tv account token, which is not the same thing as PLEX_TOKEN — a server token is refused by plex.tv outright, and the error says so rather than handing you a bare 401. The Sonos route is consulted only when that variable is set, and clients says which routes it asked either way. It goes over Plex's cloud rather than through your server, so anything watching your server for a session will lag the command; that matters if you run Home Assistant, and it is another reason to leave this gate shut where something else already dispatches.

Starting playback is all play does. There is no pause, stop, resume, seek, next, previous, volume or queue command, and there is not going to be one: a start button is a handoff, and a transport is a second system believing it owns your queue.

Both routes ship without having started music on real hardware. Everything up to the final request is confirmed against a live Plex Media Server — the play queue is created for a track, an album and a playlist, and the empty-client case is handled — but no Plex client advertised to the server while this was written, and no plex.tv account token was available for Sonos. If you are the first to use it, --now is the moment to find out, and a report either way is welcome on the issue tracker.

What media_id is, and what consumes it

Every command that identifies one item prints a block like this and then stops — play, which Playback can switch on, prints the same block and then starts the item:

item:
  media_id: "plex://a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f8a9b0/111"
  rating_key: 111
  guid: "plex://track/a1b2c3d4e5f60718293c0111"
  note: "rating_key is local to this server and changes when an item is re-matched or the library is rebuilt; guid is the identifier that survives, so keep them together"

media_id is plex://<machineIdentifier>/<ratingKey>: the id of the item, prefixed by the id of the server it lives on. That combination is what a media player needs to fetch it without being told separately which Plex server you meant, and it is the form most Plex clients and integrations accept as a media content id.

It matters that it is that form. Six plex:// strings circulate and they all look alike. Two of them break a consumer: plex://track/<ratingKey> parses the word track as a server name and resolves to a server that does not exist, and plex://track/<24-hex> — which is a perfectly legitimate Plex identifier, the one printed here as guid — raises an error inside consumers that expect a number in that position. plex-axi emits only the safe form, and a test sweeps every command asserting it never emits the other two.

Every row of every list carries a media_id too, not just the single-item block above. A list view that printed a bare key would end one call short of the thing the tool exists to produce. The guid is not in the default row: it is the identifier you write down rather than the one a consumer takes, and it is available by name (--fields key,title,guid) and in the detail views.

A playlist has one as well. plex-axi playlist list and plex-axi playlist show print a media_id for the playlist itself, so playing a whole playlist needs no more assembly than playing one track does. A playlist's rating key lives in the same /library/metadata namespace, so the same plex://<machineIdentifier>/<ratingKey> form resolves to the playlist — verified on a real server and against a real consumer, not assumed.

Out of the box plex-axi does not dispatch it anywhere. Handing it to something that plays is a single call in whatever already owns your speakers. In Home Assistant, for example, the media_player.play_media service takes it directly:

service: media_player.play_media
target:
  entity_id: media_player.example_speaker
data:
  media_content_type: music
  media_content_id: "plex://a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f8a9b0/111"

That is illustrative, not a dependency: nothing in plex-axi knows Home Assistant exists, and the same id is what Plex's own clients and other integrations consume. Substitute whatever plays music where you are — or, if nothing does, Playback switches on a play command that takes this rating key directly.

Keep the guid with the rating_key wherever you write one down. A rating key is a row number in one server's database. It changes when an item is re-matched or the library is rebuilt, and the same number will then resolve to a different recording — silently. The guid is usually the identifier that survives, which is why both are printed together and why the note travels with them.

"Usually", because of one shape. An item Plex never matched to its catalogue carries local://<rating_key> — the rating key with a scheme in front of it — and that is common enough to matter, roughly one track in seven on a real library. Such a guid moves exactly when the rating key moves, so there is nothing durable to record for those items and the note says that instead of promising the opposite. Match them by artist and title if you need them to survive a rebuild.

Agent integration

Install the Agent Skill so an agent loads the guidance on demand, without paying for it in every session:

npx skills add dmealing/plex-axi --skill plex-axi

skills/plex-axi/SKILL.md is generated from the CLI's own command table, so it cannot describe a flag that does not exist.

Design notes

• The client library is python-plexapi, chosen for its model rather than its transport: it is the only Plex library with MusicSection, the filter language, and server-side field validation. It is synchronous, which is a hazard in a long-running service and simply correct in a one-shot CLI — do not "fix" it.
• Plex's media-query language is documented in the community OpenAPI specification (https://github.com/LukeHagar/plex-api-spec, MIT), which is the thing to cite rather than re-derive.
• Playback reaches a local client through the server's own remote-control path and a Sonos speaker through one documented sonos.plex.tv endpoint parsed with the standard library. It deliberately does not use the client library's PlexClient/MyPlexAccount/plexapi.sonos object model, which is asserted by a test: that surface resolves speakers by name and dispatches to them, and keeping it out of the process is what stops "play one thing on one named target" growing into a control plane by accident.
• Development notes, including every sharp edge behind the code, are in AGENTS.md.

Contributing

pip install -e ".[dev]"
scripts/install-hooks.sh
pytest && ruff check . && ruff format --check . && scripts/leakcheck.py

This repository is public and a music library is full of identifying content, so a leak guard runs in a pre-commit hook, a commit-msg hook and CI. Its coverage is bounded and it does not replace review: it detects shapes — tokens, addresses, machine identifiers, media paths — and it cannot detect a real artist name, which has no shape. Use obviously-synthetic content everywhere, including tests and fixtures.

The TOON encoder is held to the specification's own opinion as well as to this project's: every official encode fixture is vendored byte-for-byte from toon-format/spec and runs on every pytest. The case count is asserted too, so a fixture that stops being collected fails the suite instead of quietly lowering the score, and so are the per-file checksums, so a fixture edited to suit the encoder fails as well.

Commit messages are checked as well as scanned. release-please builds the changelog and the version bump from them, and when its parser cannot read one it says so at debug level, drops the commit and exits 0 — a fix merged to main that is never published, with a green release run over it. So scripts/commitcheck.py refuses a message that parser would reject, from the same commit-msg hook, and the release workflow re-checks every commit since the last tag. Rich commit bodies are the point of this history and nothing here restricts them; the one shape to know is that a body line must not begin with a word run straight into an unclosed or nested parenthesis — `Decimal(repr(v))` at a line start is refused, and the same phrase one word further along the line is fine. Run scripts/commitcheck.py --rules for the grammar rule and its citation.

Tests never need a live Plex server or a real token, and must not start to.

Changelog

Every release is recorded in CHANGELOG.md, generated from Conventional Commit messages by release-please.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

tests/fixtures/toon-spec/ vendors the TOON specification's conformance fixtures, which are MIT licensed and copyright their authors; the upstream licence, the commit they came from and the refresh recipe are recorded beside them in PROVENANCE.md.