How should I go about migrating docker containers to an other server
reddit / selfhosted

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lucassou · 2023-10-05 14:37

Hey,

So I've been hosting services for a while on a raspberry pi 4, it
worked alright but I wanted something a little bit more responsive for
some services so i've purchased a second hand intel nuc.

I run almost everything in docker containers and manage everything
using portainer.

Most of the services uses volumes for persistent data, some uses
static files, but quite a few have databases which are the ones
worrying me (sqlite, mariaDB, postgre, mongodb...)

Currently my strategy to migrate everything to a new sever is
essentially shuttingdown everything on the raspberry, copy all the
volumes to the new server, export and import the portainer config on
the new server, adapt the volume path for each services, start every
container again and manually fix the services that didn't like the
transfer.


I was wondering if there was some better way to proceed.

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Eirikr70 · 2023-10-05 14:56

It sounds perfect, but some apps might have specific policies for
migrating, such as
[Immich](https://immich.app/docs/administration/backup-and-restore).
So you'd better control the migration before erasing any of the data
off from the Pi.

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FragoulisNaval · 2023-10-05 15:18

I did exactly as you described when i purchased my backup server and
everything worked smoothly.

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CrispyBegs · 2023-10-05 15:29

i did what you're describing and it worked fine

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thekrautboy · 2023-10-05 16:19

For database containers, its common practice to pin their images to
specific versions (or atleast major versions) and not use *latest* for
example. Also to run a proper backup of the database (dump) instead of
just copying the volumes, databases can be weird about that. So
depening on the exact db type, run a backup or dump of it.

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Ok-Flounder-9205 · 2023-10-05 17:38

You had to check your used container Image because of the
architecture. The raspberry pi has an arm CPU and your nuc x86 or
amd64.

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lucassou · 2023-10-05 17:46

Yeah thanks I know that I had to use a special tag for the version of
mongodb, i'll need to update that.

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peteyhasnoshoes · 2023-10-06 01:04

This is spot on. Databases are often way bigger on disk than the dump
too. It's always best to configure things using flat text files like
compose if possible, when things go awry or need migrating it makes
life so much easier

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sowhatidoit · 2023-10-06 02:45

I'm in a similar boat.
I've been exclusively using a pi to selfhost and now designing the
layout to accomodate an additional 2 machines.

This doesn't really answer your question but I am considering to
document my configurations using something like Ansible, for when
future hardware upgrades/failures occur. I can be up and running in a
short amount of time.

I'm curious to hear what people suggest.

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haaiiychii · 2023-10-06 19:26

That's pretty much what I did when moving from a Pi to a NUC.

Just stopped everything, SCP'd it across and everything worked
straight away (luckily)