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Unraid as a NAS OS provides an easy way to use old hardware for some network-attached storage. However, including docker can also be a great way to get network-attached computing by running docker containers on the host. But we want to do this with something other than just the included web console; management of containers can get tedious and make each container a bit of a snowflake rather than a repeatable deployable resource that will behave the same each time it’s deployed.

In this post, you will learn how to set up and use Ansible on an Unraid host to manage resources more efficiently and apply Infrastructure as Code to your Unraid system. With Ansible, you’ll also learn how to operate and configure just containers or use docker-compose stacks for more complex container needs and use Ansible’s templating engine to the fullest.

Like any sound long-running system, such as a generator or your long-running containers, there's always some maintenance that you should consider (and should be scheduled, too!). Without this maintenance, you might find the performance degrades over time or experience outright failures. In this post, we will explore some of these maintenance tasks you should consider to get a better handle on the docker engine you are running and ensure you're getting the most out of it.

I have recently gone from running the most minimal HTTP version of the registry on my machine to support my local docker image development workflows to running my own private docker registry available to private and public hosts with access control. I’ll run you through all the steps and gotchas so you can set up whatever kind of registry you need as it’s become a key part of my Dev Ops infrastructure and probably will be for you as well when you see how easy it is.