Bock Media: a self-hosted Alexa skill + music server to replace the deprecated Plex Alexa skill
Hello 
The official Plex Alexa skill quietly disappeared from the skill store a while back and I haven't seen a clean replacement discussed here. I've been running a self-hosted solution for a few months now and it's been solid, so figured I'd share it for anyone else who lost that workflow.
It's called Bock Media and it's open source: GitHub - andystumpf/bock-media: Self-hosted local music server + custom Alexa skill — stream your own library on any Echo by voice. · GitHub
Live DEMO https://bock-media.onrender.com It might take a min to spin up.
Two features I can't live without now:
Automation — playlists can be scheduled to play on specific Echos at set days and times. Coffee's brewing, music's already playing. No voice command needed.
Phone as a remote — open http://<your-server-ip>:3001 in your phone browser on the same network and you get a full playback remote. Start/stop music, switch playlists, change the volume. No app install. This was something I always wanted and never had with the original skill.
Bock Media is a self-hosted Flask server + custom Alexa skill that lets any Amazon Echo play music straight from your local library. It indexes your library into a local SQLite cache, streams audio over a Cloudflare tunnel, and includes a full web admin console to manage everything.
Full feature rundown
Voice playback on any Echo — playlists, artists, albums, tracks, genres, even audiobooks. Uses the invocation "bock media."
Fuzzy matching handles close-enough spoken names. Full AudioPlayer transport: pause, resume, next/previous, shuffle, loop.
Plex playlist sync — pulls your Plex audio playlists in near real-time, so whatever you've curated in Plex is immediately available by voice. Voice "add this to playlist" can even write back to Plex.
Web admin console — dashboard, now playing, analytics (Chart.js listening history, heatmaps, top artists/tracks), playlist management, device management, and more. And as I mentioned — it's fully usable from your phone browser on the LAN.
"Play on device" + Automation — push a playlist to a specific Echo from the web UI, or schedule playlists to auto-start at set times on chosen devices (via the unofficial Alexa API, same as Home Assistant uses).
Proper Alexa security — full request-signature verification, cert validation, application ID pinning. The public tunnel only exposes the endpoints Alexa actually needs.
Sleep timer, stop-after-N, never-play-again — all by voice.
Try it in 2 seconds
There's a demo seed script that generates a fictional library + listening history so you can click through the entire admin console without music files, an Echo, or a Plex server.
bash
Clone repo or git clone GitHub - andystumpf/bock-media: Self-hosted local music server + custom Alexa skill — stream your own library on any Echo by voice. · GitHub cd bock-media pip install -r requirements.txt python3 scripts/seed_demo_data.py --config --alexa-remote PORT=3001 python3 server.py
Then open http://localhost:3001.
What you need for real use
All free! Unless you want to buy a domain for a couple buck instead of using the free cloudflare tier!
- Python 3.10+, ffmpeg
- A Cloudflare account + named tunnel (free tier works)
- An Amazon Developer account to host the custom skill (dev mode is fine, no certification needed for personal use)
- Your existing Plex library or any folder with music /
songs_cacheSQLite index
"Play on device" — push a playlist to a specific Echo directly from the web UI without saying anything.
Sleep timer, stop-after-N songs, never-play-again — all by voice.
Try it without any hardware
A demo seed script generates a fictional library and listening history so you can explore the full admin console before committing to the setup:
bash
git clone GitHub - andystumpf/bock-media: Self-hosted local music server + custom Alexa skill — stream your own library on any Echo by voice. · GitHub cd bock-media pip install -r requirements.txt python3 scripts/seed_demo_data.py --config --alexa-remote PORT=3001 python3 server.py
Open http://localhost:3001 and click around.
What the setup actually requires
- Python 3.10+, ffmpeg
- A Cloudflare account + named tunnel (free tier is fine)
- An Amazon Developer account for the custom skill (dev mode works, no certification needed for personal use)
- Your existing Plex library
Worth noting: it uses the same unofficial Alexa API that Home Assistant's Alexa Media Player integration uses, so the "Play on device" and Automation features carry the same caveats — cookies expire, Amazon can change things. But for day-to-day home use it's been reliable.
Happy to answer setup questions if anyone tries it.
Full setup docs are in the README bock-media/README.md at main · andystumpf/bock-media · GitHub