To configure the NFS server, we choose which directories we want to share. The terminology used in NFS to share a directory is to export the directory; therefore, shared directories are known as exports.

To permanently export a directory, we add the configuration to the /etc/exports file. This file exists, but will be empty on a new system. The nfs-server service will read this file on startup to determine which directories should be available to the network client. If /etc/exports is changed, reloading the nfs-server service will force the service to reread the file, as shown in the following command line:

$ sudo systemctl reload nfs-server

To display the current exports on the server, we can use the exportfs or showmount command. We will now take a little time to start the required services and create our first simple export.

Firstly, we will need to start the required services. We can start and enable each service independently, but in the spirit of automation...