Docker and Ansible: Using Utility Containers to replace NERDTools in Unraid

Apparently, there was some disagreement between Lime Tech, the makers of Unraid, and the maintainers of the beloved Unraid Community plugin NerdTools about a change in the NAS OS company's business model. So, the NerdTools folks abandoned the project.

UPDATE: un-get appears to be the new tool power users from the community have gravitated toward. I still prefer the utility container approach though.

What is NERDtools

NerdTools is an Unraid OS plugin that allows you to install additional packages. From the looks of it, the plugin is essentially a GUI package manager for Unraid that installs Slackware packages (with dependencies) to the /boot/extra/ directory, which is where Unraid looks for additional packages.

Why move?

First, NERDtools was never an officially supported by Lime Tech.

It was great, but it only had a specific and limited set of utilities, so I found it lacking when I wanted to, for example, use vagrant with libvirt as a provider since Unraid uses libvirt as the backend for VMs. But that would have required going down a Slackware rabbithole, which I wasn't really committed to (although sbopkg looked promising).

Even those who have built tools specifically to install Slackware pkgs on Unraid like un-get recommend using Docker, LXC, or VMs before installing on bare metal. So I can't argue in terms of the isolation and portability.

So I removed the NERDtools plugins and moved associate scripts run by cron jobs to a local home lab code repository.

How everything is setup now

Simplest way to run things: containerize the process, then run via host cron.

First, to automate things with Ansible, I had to install Python 3 for Unraid which was essentially a suite of Slackware python tools.

I considered rolling my own Docker container and storing it in a self-hosted container distribution registry, which would keep the infrastructure internal and less reliant on external services like Dockerhub. But I later decided to build on the work of project maintainers since they tools I used already offered prebuilt images with the binaries baked in and decent documentation. I also considered adding a layer on top of theirs to have the args in the container, but that would make my playbooks less explicit. Although, I still might consider adding it in the future to reduce the number of tasks needed.

Here’s an example of one of the playbooks I now use for router backups:

---
- name: Backup router
  hosts: wrt

  tasks:
    - name: Mount backup share
      ansible.posix.mount:
        src: nas:/mnt/user/backup/openwrt
        path: /mnt/backup
        state: ephemeral 
        boot: false
        fstype: nfs

    - name: Generate backup
      ansible.builtin.shell: |
        umask go=
        sysupgrade -b /mnt/backup/backup-FriendlyWrt-{{ ansible_date_time.date }}.tar.gz

Result

This approach makes it so much easier to manage and backup the various services and servers I’ve setup.