MovieMatch for Plex

The other day, I stumbled upon MovieMatch, an open-source project that makes choosing a movie from your collection a democratic process. MovieMatch connects to your Plex server and turns your movie library into a Tinder-style experience: swipe right if you want to watch a movie, swipe left if you don’t. When multiple people swipe right on the same movie, it becomes a match, and the best-matched movies float to the top.

Personally, I enjoy the process of discussing every option and watching trailers endlessly. Picking a movie often comes with FOMO; choosing one always means not choosing all of the other candidates.

Below are two screenshots of the mobile view of the app, presenting a rather tempting movie option.

Features

The app lets you create rooms that you can share with your friends via a link. When creating a room, you can already preselect which movies will appear (for example, unwatched titles or movies with an IMDb score above 6).

In my fork — built on top of the original project by LucasChanning and an improved fork by dhicock — I added several improvements:

• Trailer button in the movie detail view, so you can quickly check a trailer before committing
• External ratings support (IMDb / Rotten Tomatoes when available via Plex metadata)
• More detailed movie cards, showing additional metadata at a glance
• Improved translations and UI text
• Prebuilt Docker images, published to Docker Hub and GHCR for easy deployment

Installation with Docker

Getting MovieMatch running is very straightforward. Below is a minimal docker-compose.yml example:

version: '3'
services:
  moviematch:
    image: iovidius/moviematch:latest # or ghcr.io/joszuijderwijk/moviematch:latest
    container_name: moviematch
    environment:
      PLEX_URL: "PLEXURL"
      PLEX_TOKEN: "TOK"
    ports:
      - 8000:8000

You can obtain your Plex token, X-Plex-Token, in an easy though slightly clunky way (tutorial).

To be able to connect to the app remotely you need a reverse proxy. Personally I use Nginx Proxy Manager. This also makes it easy to add basic authentication to your website, so other people can’t meddle with your (possibly already heated) movie discussions.

Have fun! 🍿 Also feel free to improve this project with even more features (pick one movie at random? Max number of swipes?)