NFS Shares with Apps on TrueNAS SCALE

With the recent changes to TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 concerning HostPath validation (read our news or our adding storage pages to learn more) the one way to add media storage is to mount NFS Shares to your TrueCharts applications. This process involves two parts, and this guide will demonstrate each step to create NFS Shares in SCALE and then add them in the Storage section of TrueCharts apps. This won’t work with the official catalog applications. As well, one can use NFS shares and SMB shares on the same dataset, but only NFS shares are mounted by TrueCharts applications.

Application Databases / Configs on NFS Shares

NFS Shares are meant to storing your file/media shares in case they need to be share with other users or computers. This is not meant for the entire application. Our recommended approach and default for most applications is PVC storage (read more here). There is known cases of database corruption with NFS Shares and sqlite so you are warned.

Part 1 - Create NFS Shares in SCALE

In the main SCALE GUI, select the Shares item on the menu bar and you’ll read this page.

Click on Add inside the UNIX (NFS) Shares section.

• Select the dataset or folder that contains your media library, description is optional but helps, and then click Save choose the Save option.

• Repeat as necessary for different folders or datasets you wish to share, and make sure you note the paths of each NFS Share, as you will need to enter those later.

Part 2 - Add NFS Shares to Applications

Next you’re going to add NFS Storage to your applications. This can be in the media or downloads storage for certain apps or Additional App Storage for others (such as the example below). We do no recommend installing the entire app to NFS Shares as that can corrupt any databases inside the app. This is meant for media or file storage only.

• Select Add next to Additional Add Storage

• Change to NFS Share in the Type of Storage dropdown

• Enter info for your NFS Share as below, for this example we’ll use the Downloads share we created above.
  • The NFS Server can be localhost or your SCALE IP, I keep SCALE IP.
  • Path on NFS Server has to match your NFS Shares path, as above I had mnt/Storage/Apps/Downloads/
  • Mount Path* is the container path, I simply put /downloads

• Continue entering info as any regular app and click Save.

And that’s it, to verify depending on the app you can use the App Shell such as the example below or the GUI inside the web interface of your app.