Selfhosted

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 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"; done

After that, I ran du -sh against 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/stacks folder I moved those files to was mounted by Dockhand in the compose file.

docker compose up -d in 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.

I don't get the only cli mindset, in enterprise and home lab it's great to have monitoring and insight into what's running.

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.

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.

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

Very happy when I migrated over to dockhand. Fits exactly my needs for a simplistic overview of all of my containers and their resources.

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?

Declarative is awesome.

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.

Does your compose file in itself give you a nice, easily readable status display, analytics, metrics, logging, etc. interface?

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.