Contemplating Switching To TrueNAS: Management without GUI?

Hello,

some background: I’m starting a rebuild of the home infrastructure with an emphasis on central management and documentation - time progresses and I want to get started on a setup that may be interpretable/understandable in its entirety by a consultant in my absence.

The goal is to use salt stack for the entire thing - and get rid of all network elements relying on GUI for maintenance. The latter is guided by my firewall-journey from shorewall to OpnSense and now to VyOS - I just want my configs CLI based and git-tracked.

Similar to that transition I now am looking to replace my QNAP NAS (GUI-managed) and am having trouble finding documentation about CLI-based configuration of TrueNAS as a candidate replacement.
Is it possible? Where is it documented? If no, what alternative(s) might be more suitable?

Thanks for any pointers.

Sincerely, Joh

The git-tracked part? No, I don’t believe so. TrueNAS’ configuration lives in a SQLite database (any config files are dynamically generated from that database at boot), and that wouldn’t be compatible with git.

If you let that go, yes, TrueNAS has a CLI that can be used to manage it, but AFAICT it’s entirely undocumented.

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Well. The SQLite part could be managed using git/lfs, if somewhat non sensically, but the absence of CLI documentation is a bummer - my own lack of luck in finding it had me guess as much… Alternative more ‘greybeard’-compatible products?

I mean, there’s always “roll your own Linux/ZFS/Samba.” Or if you really want to play the “greybeard” card, try Omni-OS instead. I’m not aware of anything intended to be a NAS/file server that’s also intended to be managed using the CLI.

Yeah, if you just want to go “bare” with CLI, I’d just go straight to vanilla Ubuntu Server/FreeBSD at that point.

A big point of TrueNAS is the web GUI + the SQLite db enabling “firmware-like” operation for easy recoveries.

Its a lot of work to automate management of a single NAS.

Larger deployments use APIs and then focus on just the common tasks, not abnormal ones.

The Apis are here: