A Developer's Introduction to Unraid

Unraid is a proprietary Linux-based operating system designed for home servers and small businesses. It’s known for its unique storage management system, which provides flexibility and data protection. You can use Unraid to run a variety of services, including web servers, databases, and CI/CD tools, all on a single machine.

Key Features for Developer’s tasks

Docker and Virtualization: Unraid has built-in support for running Docker containers and virtual machines. This is a major plus and why I chose to build such a machine instead of a Linux server; it allows easy deployment and management of isolated application environments. You can choose between a local VPS or a Dockerized environment.
Flexible Storage: Unraid’s most distinctive feature is its storage array. It combines drives of different sizes into a single, logical pool. This is unlike traditional RAID, which typically requires drives of the same size. Unraid uses a parity drive (or two for more protection) to protect against a single (or two) drive failure. Data is written directly to individual drives, which makes it easy to add or remove drives without rebuilding the entire array. For developers, this means they can start with a small setup and expand storage as needed without downtime or complex migrations.
Plugin System and Community Apps: Unraid has a robust plugin system and a “Community Apps” store. This lets you easily install and manage a wide range of applications, including many useful for development, like GitLab and various reverse proxies. For example, I use Gitea, Mailpit (an email and SMTP testing tool), MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, and TimescaleDB along with some others. Since there wasn’t a ready-to-use template for TimescaleDB, I created one and shared it with the community (it was easy).

Use Cases

Developers can use Unraid for:

Local Development Environment: Host your code repositories, databases, and application servers in a single, controlled environment.
CI/CD Pipeline: Run self-hosted runners for Gitlab CI, Jenkins, or other CI/CD platforms.
Media and Data Hoarding: Use it as a personal media server with Plex or as a centralized backup destination for your projects.
Docker: Leverage Docker containers for microservices, development environments, or isolated applications.
Virtual Machines: Run various operating systems, like Windows or different Linux distributions, for testing or specialized development tasks.

You can also develop your own Community Applications and share them with others, like I did with the templates at https://github.com/glls/Docker-Templates-Unraid.