Migrating from Portainer?

[alexander-paterson]

I, like a lot of people have been using Portainer for quite a while.

I've just installed Dockge and when I log in I can see a few stacks that say they aren't managed by Dockge, how do get them to be managed by Dockge? Is it just a case of recreating things from withing Dockge?

[hunkyn]

Thank you for asking. Came to here to ask the same. If there is a way to migrate from portainer that would be great.

[louislam]

Pretty much manually at this moment:

1. Copy the compose yaml to Dockge with a same stack name and save.
2. Stop and down the stack in Portainer
3. Start the stack via Dockge

[epsimatic]

1. In Portainer, go to «Stack details»
2. «Detach from Git» if you're managing your stack in Git
3. Click «Editor», «Copy to clipboard»
4. In Dockge, create a new stack («+Compose»)
5. Delete the generated compose code, paste your own code from the clipboard.
6. Enter the correct «Stack Name» (same as you had in Portainer. Dockge doesn't pick up the stack name from compose yaml)
7. In Portainer, click «Environment variables» → «Advanced mode», «Copy to clipboard»
8. In Dockge, paste the copied text to «.env». Click «Save».

Now, actually, the stack is marked Active as Dockge starts managing the stack right away. But let's fully detach it:

1. In Dockge, click «Update» to cut some future downtime.
2. In Portainer, click «Stack» → «Stop this stack»
3. In Dockge, reload the page (the stack is now «inactive»), then click «Start».
4. Do your checks. If all is well, go to Portainer and «Delete this stack»
5. Click «Start» in Dockge again, as Portainer got slightly confused and stopped the stack it isn't actually managing

[depasseg]

Will Docker Volumes work this way, or does the data need to be moved?

[epsimatic]

Docker volumes stay after you removed the container (check it with docker volume list). You can delete them after every referencing container is destroyed, but Docker won't remove a volume on its own.

If you remove a container and recreate it, it'll use the same volume with the same data.

[depasseg]

Sorry, I mean that if I have a volume being used in Portainer stack, and copy the compose file over to Dockge, will Dockge use the same Volume?

Like in the example below, do I need to do anything special to the speedtest-config and speedtest-db volumes?

version: 3.3
services:
    speedtest-tracker:
        container_name: speedtest-tracker
        ports:
            - 8080:80
        environment:
            - PUID=1000
            - PGID=1000
            - DB_CONNECTION=pgsql
            - DB_HOST=db
            - DB_PORT=5432
            - DB_DATABASE=speedtest_tracker
            - DB_USERNAME=speedyadmin
            - DB_PASSWORD=password
            - TZ=America/New_York
        volumes:
            - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
            - speedtest-config:/config
        image: ghcr.io/alexjustesen/speedtest-tracker:latest
        restart: unless-stopped
        depends_on:
            - db
    db:
        image: postgres:15
        restart: always
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_DB=speedtest_tracker
            - POSTGRES_USER=pgadmin
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password
        volumes:
            - speedtest-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
  speedtest-config:
  speedtest-db:

[epsimatic]

Yes, that should work. At the end of the day both systems run docker compose up ....

If you use the same yaml and .env, you'll get the same result.

Plus you can roll everything back after you clicked «Stop this stack» in Portainer and before you clicked «Delete this stack»

[mcdoubleyou]

an import Option or sharing the config to both containers would be great - otherwise I have multiple location for my compose files
THX

[nathan815]

You are managing the same stack in both portainer and dockge?

[DocMAX]

we need a automated "import" solution by dockge

[amirhomayoun]

Have been using dockge for a day now! And love it, probably will migrate from portainer to dockge for all my homelab docker images. Thanks for dockge! It does the exact things I want, and is clean and fast!

As for migrating, all my portainer yaml files are in:

portainer_data/compose/

In different directories each having a different number:

...
portainer_data/compose/40/docker-compose.yml
portainer_data/compose/76/docker-compose.yml
portainer_data/compose/84/docker-compose.yml
portainer_data/compose/2/docker-compose.yml
...

portainer_data is where my portainer docker compose mounts to /data.

I just copied the files one by one using cp into my stacks directory for dockge, stopped the image in portainer and started it in dockge. Worked perfectly.

I guess some automated migration script would be nice, but it's tricky. I started writing one for myself, and ended up not using a script.
I prefer to have my docker compose files in separate directories under stacks. So, somehow one needs to choose the name of that directory. This could be the container_name if there is only one image in the stack, but what about those with multiple images? And then all docker compose files may not have a container_name in them.

Personally, I am taking the time to clean up the docker compose files, remove comments, etc. and bring the cleaned up version to dockge.