Webhooks · Automation · Tautulli · 13 min read · October 8, 2026

Plex Webhooks and Automation: Triggers, Tautulli, and Smart Home Integration

What Are Plex Webhooks?

Webhooks let Plex notify external services when events happen — a movie starts playing, a new file is added, transcoding begins. Instead of polling your server constantly, services receive instant notifications. Plex Pass subscribers get native webhook support; everyone else can use Tautulli.

Plex Native Webhooks

Go to Settings → Webhooks → Add Webhook. Plex sends JSON payloads for these events:

• media.play: Something started playing
• media.pause: Playback paused
• media.resume: Playback resumed
• media.stop: Playback stopped
• media.scrobble: Item marked as played (watched threshold reached)
• library.new: New item added to a library
• library.on.deck: Item added to On Deck

Each payload includes the media type, title, user, player, and server details — enough context to build sophisticated automations.

Tautulli: The Power Tool

Tautulli (formerly PlexPy) is the most popular Plex monitoring tool. It tracks everything — who's watching what, transcoding stats, bandwidth usage, play history — and offers far more webhook/notification flexibility than native Plex.

Setting up notifications

1. Install Tautulli (Docker recommended: docker pull tautulli/tautulli)
2. Connect to your Plex server via the setup wizard
3. Go to Settings → Notification Agents → Add a new notification agent
4. Choose your service: Discord, Slack, Email, Webhook, Telegram, Pushover, and dozens more
5. Configure triggers: which events fire this notification
6. Customize the message template with Tautulli variables

Popular Automation Examples

Discord "Now Playing" channel

Send a rich embed to Discord whenever someone starts a movie or episode. Include the poster, title, user, quality, and whether it's transcoding or direct playing. Your server community sees what's popular in real-time.

Smart home media lighting

Trigger Home Assistant scenes when playback starts:

• Movie starts → dim living room lights to 20%, set color temperature to warm
• Playback pauses → raise lights to 60%
• Playback stops → return to normal lighting

Use the Tautulli webhook agent pointing at your Home Assistant webhook URL, with conditions filtering for specific players (only your living room Plex client).

Automatic library scanning

When your download client (Sonarr, Radarr) finishes, trigger a Plex library scan of the specific folder. This gets new content into Plex within seconds instead of waiting for the scheduled scan.

Transcoding alerts

Get notified when someone is transcoding 4K content (which hammers your CPU). You can then message the user to switch clients or adjust their quality settings. Tautulli can even automatically kill transcoding streams that exceed a threshold.

Custom Scripts

Tautulli can execute custom scripts on any event. Common uses:

• Auto-optimize: When a new movie is added, queue it for Plex's built-in optimization to create a mobile-friendly version
• Backup on schedule: Daily script that backs up Plex database and preferences to cloud storage
• User management: Automatically disable inactive users after 90 days of no activity
• Storage alerts: Script that checks disk space and sends a warning when below 10% free

Webhook Security

Webhook URLs should be treated as secrets — anyone with the URL can send fake events. Best practices:

• Use HTTPS endpoints only
• Implement a shared secret/token in the webhook URL
• Validate the payload structure before acting on it
• Rate-limit your webhook handler to prevent abuse