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Setup a NFS Server With Docker

In this tutorial we will setup a NFS Server using Docker for our development environment.

Host Storage Path

In this example we will be using our host path /data/nfs-storage which will host our storage for our NFS server, which will will mount to the container:

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$ mkdir -p /data/nfs-storage

NFS Server

Create the NFS Server with docker:

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$ docker run -itd --privileged \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -e SHARED_DIRECTORY=/data \
  -v /data/nfs-storage:/data \
  -p 2049:2049 \
  itsthenetwork/nfs-server-alpine:12

We can do the same using docker-compose, for our docker-compose.yml:

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version: "2.1"
services:
  # https://hub.docker.com/r/itsthenetwork/nfs-server-alpine
  nfs:
    image: itsthenetwork/nfs-server-alpine:12
    container_name: nfs
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    environment:
      - SHARED_DIRECTORY=/data
    volumes:
      - /data/nfs-storage:/data
    ports:
      - 2049:2049

To deploy using docker-compose:

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$ docker-compose up -d

NFS Client

To use a NFS Client to mount this to your filesystem, you can look at this blogpost>

In summary:

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$ sudo apt install nfs-client -y
$ sudo mount -v -o vers=4,loud 192.168.0.4:/ /mnt

Verify that the mount is showing:

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$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       109G   53G   51G  52% /
192.168.0.4:/   4.5T  2.2T  2.1T  51% /mnt

Now, create a test file on our NFS export:

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$ touch /mnt/file.txt

Verify that the test file is on the local path:

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$ ls /data/nfs-storage/
file.txt

If you want to load this into other client’s /etc/fstab:

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192.168.0.4:/   /mnt   nfs4    _netdev,auto  0  0

NFS Docker Volume Plugin

You can use a NFS Volume Plugin for Docker or Docker Swarm for persistent container storage.

To use the NFS Volume plugin, we need to download docker-volume-netshare from their github releases page.

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$ wget https://github.com/ContainX/docker-volume-netshare/releases/download/v0.36/docker-volume-netshare_0.36_amd64.deb
$ dpkg -i docker-volume-netshare_0.36_amd64.deb
$ service docker-volume-netshare start

Then your docker-compose.yml:

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version: '3.7'

services:
  mysql:
    image: mariadb:10.1
    networks:
      - private
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=${DATABASE_PASSWORD:-admin}
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=testdb
      - MYSQL_USER=${DATABASE_USER:-admin}
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=${DATABASE_PASSWORD:-admin}
    volumes:
      - mysql_data.vol:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  mysql_data.vol:
    driver: nfs
    driver_opts:
      share: 192.168.69.1:/mysql_data_vol

Thank You

That’s it. Thanks for reading, follow me on Twitter and say hi! @ruanbekker

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