Docker Compose NAS

After searching for the perfect NAS solution, I realized what I wanted could be achieved with some Docker containers on a vanilla Linux box. The result is an opinionated Docker Compose configuration capable of browsing indexers to retrieve media resources and downloading them through a WireGuard VPN with port forwarding. SSL certificates and remote access through Tailscale are supported.

Requirements: Any Docker-capable recent Linux box with Docker Engine and Docker Compose V2. I am running it in Ubuntu Server 22.04; I also tested this setup on a Synology DS220+ with DSM 7.1.

Table of Content

• Docker Compose NAS
  • Table of Content
  • Applications
  • Quick Start
  • Environment Variables
  • PIA WireGuard VPN
  • Sonarr & Radarr
    • File Structure
    • Download Client
  • Prowlarr
  • qBittorrent
  • Jellyfin
  • Traefik and SSL Certificates
    • Accessing from the outside with Tailscale
  • Optional Services
    • FlareSolverr
    • SABnzbd
    • AdGuard Home
      • Encryption
      • DHCP
      • Expose DNS Server with Tailscale
  • Customization
  • Synology Quirks
    • Free Ports 80 and 443
    • Install Synology WireGuard
    • Free Port 1900
    • User Permissions
    • Synology DHCP Server and Adguard Home Port Conflict
  • Use Separate Paths for Torrents and Storage
  • NFS Share
  • Static IP
  • Laptop Specific Configuration

Applications

Application	Description	Image	URL
Sonarr	PVR for newsgroup and bittorrent users	linuxserver/sonarr	/sonarr
Radarr	Movie collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users	linuxserver/radarr	/radarr
Prowlarr	Indexer aggregator for Sonarr and Radarr	linuxserver/prowlarr:latest	/prowlarr
PIA WireGuard VPN	Encapsulate qBittorrent traffic in PIA using WireGuard with port forwarding.	thrnz/docker-wireguard-pia
qBittorrent	Bittorrent client with a complete web UI Uses VPN network Using Libtorrent 1.x	linuxserver/qbittorrent:libtorrentv1	/qbittorrent
Jellyfin	Media server designed to organize, manage, and share digital media files to networked devices	linuxserver/jellyfin	/jellyfin
Heimdall	Application dashboard	linuxserver/heimdall	/
Traefik	Reverse proxy	traefik
Watchtower	Automated Docker images update	containrrr/watchtower
SABnzbd	Optional - Free and easy binary newsreader	linuxserver/sabnzbd	/sabnzbd
FlareSolverr	Optional - Proxy server to bypass Cloudflare protection in Prowlarr	flaresolverr/flaresolverr
AdGuard Home	Optional - Network-wide software for blocking ads & tracking	adguard/adguardhome
DHCP Relay	Optional - Docker DHCP Relay	modem7/dhcprelay
Traefik Certs Dumper	Optional - Dump ACME data from Traefik to certificates	ldez/traefik-certs-dumper

Optional containers are not run by default, they need to be enabled, see Optional Services for more information.

Quick Start

cp .env.example .env, edit to your needs then sudo docker compose up -d.

For the first time, run ./update-config.sh to update the applications base URLs.

Environment Variables

Variable	Description	Default
COMPOSE_FILE	Docker compose files to load	docker-compose.yml
COMPOSE_PATH_SEPARATOR	Path separator between compose files to load	:
USER_ID	ID of the user to use in Docker containers	1000
GROUP_ID	ID of the user group to use in Docker containers	1000
TIMEZONE	TimeZone used by the container.	America/New_York
DATA_ROOT	Host location of the data files	/mnt/data
DOWNLOAD_ROOT	Host download location for qBittorrent, should be a subfolder of DATA_ROOT	/mnt/data/torrents
PIA_LOCATION	Servers to use for PIA	ca (Montreal, Canada)
PIA_USER	PIA username
PIA_PASS	PIA password
PIA_LOCAL_NETWORK	PIA local network	192.168.0.0/16
HOSTNAME	Hostname of the NAS, could be a local IP or a domain name	localhost
ADGUARD_HOSTNAME	AdGuard Home hostname used, if enabled
DNS_CHALLENGE	Enable/Disable DNS01 challenge, set to false to disable.	true
DNS_CHALLENGE_PROVIDER	Provider for DNS01 challenge, see list here.	cloudflare
LETS_ENCRYPT_CA_SERVER	Let's Encrypt CA Server used to generate certificates, set to production by default. Set to https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory to test your changes with the staging server.	https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
LETS_ENCRYPT_EMAIL	E-mail address used to send expiration notifications
CLOUDFLARE_EMAIL	CloudFlare Account email
CLOUDFLARE_DNS_API_TOKEN	API token with DNS:Edit permission
CLOUDFLARE_ZONE_API_TOKEN	API token with Zone:Read permission

PIA WireGuard VPN

I chose PIA since it supports WireGuard and port forwarding, but you could use other providers:

• OpenVPN: linuxserver/openvpn-as
• WireGuard: linuxserver/wireguard
• NordVPN + OpenVPN: bubuntux/nordvpn
• NordVPN + WireGuard (NordLynx): bubuntux/nordlynx

For PIA + WireGuard, fill .env and fill it with your PIA credentials.

The location of the server it will connect to is set by LOC=ca, defaulting to Montreal - Canada.

Sonarr & Radarr

File Structure

Sonarr and Radarr must be configured to support hardlinks, to allow instant moves and prevent using twice the storage (Bittorrent downloads and final file). The trick is to use a single volume shared by the Bittorrent client and the *arrs. Subfolders are used to separate the TV shows from the movies.

The configuration is well explained by this guide.

In summary, the final structure of the shared volume will be as follows:

data
├── torrents = shared folder qBittorrent downloads
│  ├── movies = movies downloads tagged by Radarr
│  └── tv = movies downloads tagged by Sonarr
└── media = shared folder for Sonarr and Radarr files
   ├── movies = Radarr
   └── tv = Sonarr

Go to Settings > Management. In Sonarr, set the Root folder to /data/media/tv. In Radar, set the Root folder to /data/media/movies.

Download Client

Then qBittorrent can be configured at Settings > Download Clients. Because all the networking for qBittorrent takes place in the VPN container, the hostname for qBittorrent is the hostname of the VPN container, ie vpn, and the port is 8080:

Prowlarr

The indexers are configured through Prowlarr. They synchronize automatically to Radarr and Sonarr.

Radarr and Sonarr may then be added via Settings > Apps. The Prowlarr server is http://prowlarr:9696/prowlarr, the Radarr server is http://radarr:7878/radarr and Sonarr http://sonarr:8989/sonarr:

Their API keys can be found in Settings > Security > API Key.

qBittorrent

Set the default save path to /data/torrents in Settings, and restrict the network interface to WireGuard (wg0).

The web UI login page can be disabled on for the local network in Settings > Web UI > Bypass authentication for clients

192.168.0.0/16
127.0.0.0/8
172.17.0.0/16

Jellyfin

To enable hardware transcoding, depending on your system, you may need to update the following block:

devices:
  - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
  - /dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card0

Generally, running Docker on Linux you will want to use VA-API, but the exact mount paths may differ depending on your hardware.

Traefik and SSL Certificates

While you can use the private IP to access your NAS, how cool would it be for it to be accessible through a subdomain with a valid SSL certificate?

Traefik makes this trivial by using Let's Encrypt and one of its supported ACME challenge providers.

Let's assume we are using nas.domain.com as custom subdomain.

The idea is to create an A record pointing to the private IP of the NAS, 192.168.0.10 for example:

nas.domain.com.	1	IN	A	192.168.0.10

The record will be publicly exposed but not resolve given this is a private IP.

Given the NAS is not accessible from the internet, we need to do a dnsChallenge. Here we will be using CloudFlare, but the mechanism will be the same for all DNS providers baring environment variable changes, see the Traefik documentation above and Lego's documentation.

Then, fill the CloudFlare .env entries.

If you want to test your configuration first, use the Let's Encrypt staging server by updating LETS_ENCRYPT_CA_SERVER's value in .env:

LETS_ENCRYPT_CA_SERVER=https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory

If it worked, you will see the staging certificate at https://nas.domain.com. You may remove the ./letsencrypt/acme.json file and restart the services to issue the real certificate.

You are free to use any DNS01 provider. Simply replace DNS_CHALLENGE_PROVIDER with your own provider, see complete list here. You will also need to inject the environments variables specific to your provider.

Certificate generation can be disabled by setting DNS_CHALLENGE to false.

Accessing from the outside with Tailscale

If we want to make it reachable from outside the network without opening ports or exposing it to the internet, I found Tailscale to be a great solution: create a network, run the client on both the NAS and the device you are connecting from, and they will see each other.

In this case, the A record should point to the IP Tailscale assigned to the NAS, eg 100.xxx.xxx.xxx:

nas.domain.com.	1	IN	A	100.xxx.xxx.xxx

See here for installation instructions.

However, this means you will always need to be connected to Tailscale to access your NAS, even locally. This can be remedied by overriding the DNS entry for the NAS domain like 192.168.0.10 nas.domain.com in your local DNS resolver such as Pi-Hole.

This way, when connected to the local network, the NAS is accessible directly from the private IP, and from the outside you need to connect to Tailscale first, then the NAS domain will be accessible.

Optional Services

As their name would suggest, optional services are not launched by default. They have their own docker-compose.yml file in their subfolders. To enable a service, append it to the COMPOSE_FILE environment variable.

Say you want to enable FlareSolverr, you should have COMPOSE_FILE=docker-compose.yml:flaresolverr/docker-compose.yml

FlareSolverr

In Prowlarr, add the FlareSolverr indexer with the URL http://flaresolverr:8191/

SABnzbd

Enable SABnzbd by setting COMPOSE_FILE=docker-compose.yml:sabnzbd/docker-compose.yml. It will be accessible at /sabnzbd.

If that is not the case, the url_base parameter in sabnzbd.ini should be set to /sabnzbd.

AdGuard Home

Set the ADGUARD_HOSTNAME, I chose a different subdomain to use secure DNS without the folder.

On first run, specify the port 3000 and enable listen on all interfaces to make it work with Tailscale.

If after running docker compose up -d, you're getting network docker-compose-nas declared as external, but could not be found, run docker network create docker-compose-nas first.

Encryption

In Settings > Encryption Settings, set the certificates path to /opt/adguardhome/certs/certs/<YOUR_HOSTNAME>.crt and the private key to /opt/adguardhome/certs/private/<YOUR_HOSTNAME>.key, those files are created by Traefik cert dumper from the ACME certificates Traefik generates in JSON.

DHCP

If you want to use the AdGuard Home DHCP server, for example because your router does not allow changing its DNS server, you will need to select the eth0 DHCP interface matching 10.0.0.10, then specify the Gateway IP to match your router address (192.168.0.1 for example) and set a range of IP addresses assigned to local devices.

In adguardhome/docker-compose.yml, set the network interface dhcp-relay should listen to. By default, it is set to enp2s0, but you may need to change it to your host's network interface, verify it with ip a.

In the configuration (adguardhome/conf/AdGuardHome.yaml), set the DHCP options 6th key to your NAS internal IP address:

dhcp:
  dhcpv4:
    options:
      - 6 ips 192.168.0.10,192.168.0.10

Expose DNS Server with Tailscale

Based on Tailscale's documentation, it is easy to use your AdGuard server everywhere. Just make sure that AdGuard Home listens to all interfaces.

Customization

You can override the configuration of a services or add new services by creating a new docker-compose.override.yml file, then appending it to the COMPOSE_FILE environment variable: COMPOSE_FILE=docker-compose.yml:docker-compose.override.yml

See official documentation.

For example, use a different VPN provider:

version: '3.9'

services:
  vpn:
    image: ghcr.io/bubuntux/nordvpn
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN               # Required
      - NET_RAW                 # Required
    environment:                # Review https://github.com/bubuntux/nordvpn#environment-variables
      - USER=user@email.com     # Required
      - "PASS=pas$word"         # Required
      - CONNECT=United_States
      - TECHNOLOGY=NordLynx
      - NETWORK=192.168.1.0/24  # So it can be accessed within the local network

Synology Quirks

Docker compose NAS can run on DSM 7.1, with a few extra steps.

Free Ports 80 and 443

By default, ports 80 and 443 are used by Nginx but not actually used for anything useful. Free them by creating a new task in the Task Scheduler > Create > Triggered Task > User-defined script. Leave the Event as Boot-up and the root user, go to Task Settings and paste the following in User-defined script:

sed -i -e 's/80/81/' -e 's/443/444/' /usr/syno/share/nginx/server.mustache /usr/syno/share/nginx/DSM.mustache /usr/syno/share/nginx/WWWService.mustache

synosystemctl restart nginx

Install Synology WireGuard

Since WireGuard is not part of DSM's kernel, an external package must be installed for the vpn container to run.

For DSM 7.1, download and install the package corresponding to your NAS CPU architecture from here.

As specified in the project's README, the package must be run as root from the command line: sudo /var/packages/WireGuard/scripts/start

Free Port 1900

Jellyfin will fail to run by default since the port 1900 is not free. You may free it by going to Control Panel > File Services > Advanced > SSTP > Untick Enable Windows network discovery.

User Permissions

By default, the user and groups are set to 1000 as it is the default on Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions. However, that is not the case in Synology; the first user should have an ID of 1026 and a group of 100. You may check yours with id. Update the USER_ID and GROUP_ID in .env with your IDs. Not updating them may result in permission issues.

USER_ID=1026
GROUP_ID=100

Synology DHCP Server and Adguard Home Port Conflict

If you are using the Synology DHCP Server package, it will use port 53 even if it does not need it. This is because it uses Dnsmasq to handle DHCP requests, but does not serve DNS queries. The port can be released by editing (as root) /usr/local/lib/systemd/system/pkg-dhcpserver.service and adding -p 0: ExecStart=/var/packages/DhcpServer/target/dnsmasq-2.x/usr/bin/dnsmasq --user=DhcpServer --group=DhcpServer --cache-size=200 --conf-file=/etc/dhcpd/dhcpd.conf --dhcp-lease-max=2147483648 -p 0 Reboot the NAS and the port 53 will be free for Adguard.

Use Separate Paths for Torrents and Storage

If you want to use separate paths for torrents download and long term storage, to use different disks for example, set your docker-compose.override.yml to:

version: "3.9"
services:
  sonarr:
    volumes:
      - ./sonarr:/config
      - ${DATA_ROOT}/media/tv:/data/media/tv
      - ${DOWNLOAD_ROOT}/tv:/data/torrents/tv
  radarr:
    volumes:
      - ./radarr:/config
      - ${DATA_ROOT}/media/movies:/data/media/movies
      - ${DOWNLOAD_ROOT}/movies:/data/torrents/movies

Note you will lose the hard link ability, ie your files will be duplicated.

In Sonarr and Radarr, go to Settings > Importing > Untick Use Hardlinks instead of Copy

NFS Share

This can be useful to share the media folder to a local player like Kodi or computers in the local network, but may not be necessary if Jellyfin is going to be used to access the media.

Install the NFS kernel server: sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server

Then edit /etc/exports to configure your shares:

/mnt/data/media 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,all_squash,nohide,no_subtree_check,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000)

This will share the media folder to anybody on your local network (192.168.0.x). I purposely left out the sync flag that would slow down file transfer. On some devices you may need to use the insecure option for the share to be available.

Restart the NFS server to apply the changes: sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

On other machines, you can see the shared folder by adding the following to your /etc/fstab:

192.168.0.10:/mnt/data/media /mnt/nas nfs ro,hard,intr,auto,_netdev 0 0

Static IP

Set a static IP, assuming 192.168.0.10 and using Google DNS servers: sudo nano /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml

# This is the network config written by 'subiquity'
network:
  ethernets:
    enp2s0:
      dhcp4: no
      addresses:
        - 192.168.0.10/24
      gateway4: 192.168.0.1
      nameservers:
          addresses: [8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4]
  version: 2

Apply the plan: sudo netplan apply. You can check the server uses the right IP with ip a.

Laptop Specific Configuration

If the server is installed on a laptop, you may want to disable the suspension when the lid is closed: sudo nano /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Replace:

• #HandleLidSwitch=suspend by HandleLidSwitch=ignore
• #LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes by LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

Then restart: sudo service systemd-logind restart