Portainer is changing to a mostly AI and kubernetes supported app.
Having read this whoke thread, i feel its time to drop Portainer. I find it useful to edit the stackfile and do updates, as well as cleaning old volumes and images. Seems like Arcane and Dockhand are the most popular substitutes. Is the migration from Portainer easy?
I just finished the migration to Dockhand. I never had to stop a single container.
I copied out all the docker compose files portainer stored for the stacks:
sudo rsync -a /var/lib/docker/volumes/portainer_data/_data/compose/ ~/stacks-backup/The bonus of doing it this way is permissions, and it also nabs the .env files if you’ve configured vars in the Stacks config (and not directly in the compose file)
Because all the folders were just ID’s, I renamed them:
docker ps -a --format '{{.Label "com.docker.compose.project.working_dir"}}\t{{.Label "com.docker.compose.project"}}' | sort -u | while IFS=$'\t' read -r wd name; do id="${wd##*/}"; [ -n "$id" ] && [ -d ~/stacks-backup/"$id" ] && mv ~/stacks-backup/"$id" ~/stacks-backup/"$name"; doneAfter that, I ran
du -shagainst both directories to ensure they match.Once the rename was done, I settled on moving all my stack configs to
/opt/stacks, and added a folder for the compose file for dockhand, because dockhand can manage itself, unlike Portainer. Additionally, I made sure the/opt/stacksfolder I moved those files to was mounted by Dockhand in the compose file.docker compose up -din the dockhand dir, and then went to the UI.Configure the env how you want, and have it point at whatever your config was. I am running everything in Ubuntu server, so I just left the default Unix stuff set.
From there, the Stacks UI in Dockhand listed everything, but it knew nothing really about them. Pick a low-impact stack, and open it. You should see a section on the left where you can browse to
/opt/stacks, for example, and if you’ve renamed the folders, easily find the yaml. Once loaded, you should see the config on the left. On the right is where you can add your env vars. If you have a .env that moved over, there’s a folder icon at the top you can use to navigate to it and pick it.I have 18 stacks. Start to finish was approx 1 hour. I have 14 volumes, and those are all present, including the association to the stack they belong to, and everything matches what I see in Portainer, which is still up and running alongside Dockhand.
I hope this all helps you. Realistically, I don’t know if you’ll have an issue with volumes. All mine are managed via docker itself and not portainer, so there was nothing I needed to do there.
I’d also recommend Dockge. Made by the same dude who does Uptime Kuma. Super simple, works along existing stacks.
I started migrating last night. You have to stop your running instances, copy over the yaml and change the volume mounts if you used named volumes.
Dropped portainer years ago. Managing some compose files isn’t hard, and Dockhand is better for managing updates
How do you manage updates? I’ve been relying on watchtower
Portainer has worked well for me but it has so much that I don’t need or use. It looks like Dockhand has a Home Assistant integration which is nice, so I’ll check that out thanks for the rec.
Man, I didn’t even know dockhand had a HA integration, I know what I’m doing when I get home.
Very happy when I migrated over to dockhand. Fits exactly my needs for a simplistic overview of all of my containers and their resources.
How does it compare to dockage? I haven’t used either.
I dropped Portainer in favor of Dockge a few years ago. Absolutely worth it.
I really like dockge, it’s a very simple and light way to manage and update compose files. Dockhand is a fully featured editor that should have everything you’d need and more, but imo is a little trickier to use
heck yeah!
I unfortunately can’t speak to dockage as I have only used Dockhand and Portainer.
I completely forgot portainer was a thing and I’ve used compose files for a few years. If I try anything new a unified dashboard (for managing multiple hosts) would be cool.
Definitely checkout dockhand. It gives a single dashboard for all your hosts. I primarily use it for updating containers and checking logs, but it does quite a bit more. You can even point it towards your compose files and it can edit them in with a GUI, but I haven’t played with that yet.
Another good option is Arcane. Its project structure gives you a good place to put bind mounts which you can edit the contents of in app (like configs and such). It’s pretty handy. I am in the process of switching to it from komodo for all of my stacks
Guess I’ve figured out how I’m going to spend my Friday evening.
That sucks. It was one of the few GUIs that did a good job with most aspects of Docker Swarm. I knew it was heading in a shitty direction, but I was hoping something else would come along to fill the gap in the mean time.
I dumped Portainer on my home server when they did the ‘Fortnite’ graphical rebranding. Now using Arcane to manage my servers and edge nodes. Very much enjoying the CVE scan tools and in-place image updating.
I love Arcane, it’s a great tool
I just finished setting up Komodo because I couldn’t find other alternatives that seemed to fit my needs. I didn’t see Arcane amongst those ones I researched. Neat, thanks.
My devs prefer Docker, and don’t want Kubernetes! We have a fix for that: Portainer-D2K. Portainer-D2K is a Docker translator for Kubernetes
As someone who was using mostly podman and is now switching to kubernetes I can confidently say that the cli interface was not what was holding me back. Instead it was the sheer amount of setup and complexity kubernetes can bring into an environment. Kubernetes is great when you want most or all the features it offers, it is horrible if you want to deploy 3 containers for your application on one host.
Oh well, not like I have to care, I wasn’t interested in portainer to begin with.
I use 100% kubernetes at work and help other teams get their app working but at home I don’t run anything that supports it.
Right? Why do they offer a community version and a pro version that’s free for 5 nodes - meaning very small environment, your typical homelab - and push so much for stuff used to manage enterprise-sized deployments?
They want to be a competitor to openshift and rancher.
This was obvious to anyone who’s used it for any length of time. I’m just surprised the monetisation enshittification didn’t win the race.
The only thing I’ve used Portainer for in the last few years is to easily tidy up my old images.
Sure, it’s trivial on CLI, but why not. 😄 In short: nothing of value lost.
Welp, no more portainer for me
Embarrassing
I switched from Portainer to Komodo a while back. I like how everything is declarative. It almost has a Argo CD feel to it without needed kubernetes.
Declarative is awesome.
Switching to Podman. Supposedly Cockpit has a gui for it.
Portainer was outdated 5 years ago, and it sucked at the job it did.
I’ma stick with dockge and argocd
Dockge hasn’t been updated in a while though. Does not matter for me since my setup only runs in local network but I am not sure how safe it is for online use.
I went from Dockge to Dockhand, though both are good. Dockge was my UI of choice for the last couple of years, so slim and simple. I tried Dockhand on a whim and the extra features won me over, without having a bazillion buttons and confusing UI.
For a lot of my remote hosted services managed with compose, I’ve just been hand rolling the compose files and ssh’ing in.
How do you detect outdated containers?
dockcheck
I was using the watchtower updater until it got archived, thankfully there is a maintained fork now
https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower
I still need to figure out a auto update solution for my Argo managed services
Not who you responded to, but I do the same and have Pullio set up, which is lightweight and easy enough for my uses cases.
I have a few containers set up for notifying only, but most my services I just let auto-update
Maybe it helps if you have a gigantic stack of containers, but I’ve honestly never seen the point of Portainer when I can just look at my compose file.
Does your compose file in itself give you a nice, easily readable status display, analytics, metrics, logging, etc. interface?
Logging, logging into the shell and network creation was my singular use case for portainer.
No, but I’ve never needed them.
I set it up years ago when I still had Ubuntu desktop running on an old laptop. Just kept using it even after using and learning kubernetes at work on an enterprise scale. Also the automatic image checks, easy to check metrics, logs, and endpoints. I have 33 containers right now, it’s just simple to see them all in one screen.
Phew. Dodged a bullet just by adhering to SLSA.
