Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol that allows you to share remote directories over a network. With NFS, you can mount remote directories on your system and work with the files on the remote machine as if they were local files.

NFS protocol is not encrypted by default, and unlike Samba, it does not provide user authentication. Access to the server is restricted by the clients’ IP addresses or hostnames.

In this tutorial, you’ll go through the steps necessary to set up an NFSv4 Server on CentOS 8. We’ll also show you how to mount an NFS file system on the client.

The “nfs-utils” package provides the NFS utilities and daemons for the NFS server. To install it run the following command:

yum install nfs-utils
systemctl enable nfs-server

NFS server configuration options are set in /etc/nfsmount.conf and /etc/nfs.conf files.

There are two ways to configure exports on an NFS server.

• Manually editing the /etc/exports configuration file
• Using the exportfs utility on the command line

The /etc/exports file controls which file systems are exported to remote hosts and specifies options. It follows the following syntax rules:

• Blank lines are ignored.
• To add a comment, start a line with the hash mark (#).
• You can wrap long lines with a backslash (\).
• Each exported file system should be on its own individual line.
• Any lists of authorized hosts placed after an exported file system must be separated by space characters.
• Options for each of the hosts must be placed in parentheses directly after the host identifier, without any spaces separating the host and the first parenthesis.

We’ll create directory on /opt/apps that will be exported to NFS clients.