Step 1: Directory Setup Guide (DSM7.2.x)

Container Manager Install

When installing Container Manager for the first time it will automatically create your docker shared folder, so there is no need to create this manually. If you have an NVMe or SATA SSD volume make sure you install the package to it for optimal performance.

Docker path adjustments for NVMe or SATA SSD volumes

If you are using a NVMe or SSD volume you will need to adjust the storage volume shown in each guide for any /docker share to the correct volume number for your fast storage. The /data share remains on your larger hard drive volume.

For example for Plex it would look like this assuming your volume numbers are volume 1 (hard drives) volume 2 (NVMe/SSD)

    volumes:
      - /volume2/docker/plex:/config
      - /volume1/data/media:/data/media

Media Folder Set up

When passing folders into a Docker container each mount point is treated as its own filesystem.

This means when moving files between two mount points Docker will do a Copy, then Delete operation. Meaning you are creating a full duplicate of a file while its being ‘moved’ creating unwanted disk IO and temporarily taking up double the space. (especially when seeding torrents after copying to the final folders)

In order to avoid this we need to set up a clean directory structure that allows us to just have one folder or share mounted to our containers.

If you are starting with these guides and have existing media you may need to move around your data in line with this setup, I recommend creating all the folders below using File station to avoid potential permission issues later.

Directory Structure

With this setup all of your media will sit within a single share, you can call this whatever you want but in all the guides it will be called ‘data’. If you change its name you will need to adjust any steps or compose files from my guides accordingly.

Please note: it is important that you make a decision around whether to use lowercase or Uppercase folder names, I recommend just stick with lowercase everywhere as it simplifies setup. If you decide to go against this ensure you change all the volume maps in the guides to match the case! Otherwise, containers and you will be very confused.

Open up the control panel then in ‘Shared Folder’ hit ‘Create’

Screen 1 – fill out the name as ‘data’ and use Volume 1 for its storage location (Your main hard drive volume)

Screen 2 – we leave the folder unencrypted and don’t enable write once features

Screen 3 – Enable data checksums as this will help catch any issues with files during data scrubbing. (These options will not appear if you have ext4 file system – If you are starting this with a clean NAS go back change to BTRFS if possible)

Screen 4 – just click next past the summary

On the final screen we don’t need to change any user permissions yet, we will do that in the second guide.

The Sub-folders

Now we have our main ‘data’ directory we need to create a number of sub-folders to hold our media and downloaded files. You can amend this depending on whether you are using Torrents or Usenet (Newsgroups) or both.

You will initially create 3 folders within /data

• media
• torrents
• usenet

Then under /data/media create

• movies
• music
• tv
• books

Then under /data/torrents create

• completed
• incoming
• watch

Then under /data/usenet create

• completed
• intermediate
• nzb
• queue

Your folder tree should now look like this.

Finally, within the /docker shared folder create a folder called ‘projects‘ which will be used for any containers using the Projects (Docker Compose) feature of Container Manager.

You can now go back to where you left off in the guides and do the next step.

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