Installing Ansible-NAS on EndeavourOS

Introduction

Ansible-NAS is a popular automated media server setup tool. It simplifies the process of setting up a home media server by using Ansible to create an automated deployment of software packages. This tutorial will guide you through the process of installing Ansible-NAS on EndeavourOS.

Prerequisites

  • A system running EndeavourOS
  • Basic command-line skills.

Step 1: Installation of Required Packages

Ansible-NAS requires an extensive list of packages to be installed on your system. In this step, we are going to install these packages.

  1. Open the terminal and run the following command:

    sudo pacman -S git ansible nfs-utils python-boto python-httplib2 python-netaddr python-pip

    This command will install git, Ansible, NFS client utilities, and various Python libraries.

  2. Once the packages have been installed, we need to install the Ansible modules that are required by Ansible-NAS. Run the following command to install the modules:

    sudo pip install passlib python-slugify docker-py python-dev-hosts

Step 2: Cloning the Ansible-NAS repository

In this step, we will clone the Ansible-NAS repository from GitHub.

  1. Open the terminal and run the following command:

    git clone https://github.com/DaveStephens/ansible-nas.git

  2. Change into the newly created ansible-nas directory using the following command:

    cd ansible-nas

  3. Locate the config.yml.example file in the directory and rename it to config.yml with the following command:

    cp config.yml.example config.yml

Step 3: Configuring Ansible-NAS

In this step, you will configure Ansible-NAS.

  1. Open the config.yml file in your preferred text editor using the following command:

    nano config.yml

  2. You will need to modify some of the variables in the config.yml file to match your desired settings. Change the following variables:

    • Set the nas_volume_path to the directory you want to use as the root folder for your media storage.
    • Set the enabled_services list to the specific services you wish to run on your server.

  3. Once the necessary changes have been made, save and exit the file.

Step 4: Deployment of Ansible-NAS

In this step, we will use Ansible to deploy Ansible-NAS.

  1. Change into the ansible-nas directory using the following command:

    cd ~/ansible-nas

  2. Run the following command to start the deployment:

    ansible-playbook nas.yml -i inventory --ask-become-pass

  3. Ansible will prompt for the root password to run a privileged command.

  4. Once the deployment is complete, your media server will be ready to use.

Conclusion

Ansible-NAS is a powerful tool that can be used to set up a home media server. By following this tutorial, you should now have Ansible-NAS up and running on your EndeavourOS system.