Moving from runtipi to a portainer setup
Hi, given the recent announcement about the existing official appstore being hard to maintain, I wanted to migrate my existing services to a manual setup in portainer that I will manage myself. Is there anything in particular that I need to be aware of? I am already hosting some services outside of runtipi (using the portainer service provided via runtipi :P) and I would like to take ownership of the existing services while preserving the data and configuration as much as possible.
8 Replies
Hello, first of all can I ask what made you worry with the announcement and you want to move off runtipi? Because pretty much nothing changed. The official repository will remain fully maintained by us, the only thing that changes is that we won't be able to add additional apps to the official repository. You can use all the apps you like and are not in the official repository by creating your own appstore based on our template and adding each app you need which will take you about 5 minutes. Additionally you can add apps extremely fast with the use of some LLM like Copilot or Claude. We use an extremely simple version of docker compose for the apps so it should be super easy to migrate a compose file to our own format. If you still need to migrate your apps you can check the
apps/migrated/ folder which contains all of your apps (not data) and the docker compose files. Then you will need to copy the correct paths from app-data/migraged to your new location alongside with the required environment variables. If you still need all of the reverse proxy features you will need to spin up a traefik instance and reconfigure the labels. Lastly keep in mind that this is a very dangerous procedure that you should perform only if you know what you are doing. If you incorrectly copy some directory of forget an environment variable you can risk losing access to your data.Also to note that apps present are still maintained
Thanks for the tips and the clarification. I'll try to do this first for less critical applications and then proceed with others if everything goes well π€
As for the decision, sometimes my setup required me to spin up stacks on portainer directly or modify the compose files and work around the limitations of runtipi instead of benefitting from the one-click install process. I learned a lot about docker that way and now I'm more confident to set it up manually ;)
tbh that sounds like something that you could use user configs for, but I guess it's your choice
The developers of Runtipi are advanced users of Docker and Runtipi suits our needs just fine, so I can't imagine why it wouldn't be convenient, except if you prefer deploying apps in an entirely different way for security or something
Even @InfBoumcyCastle who has a very customized setup for both apps and traefik manages everything just fine.
You mention you learned some things about Docker, but please keep in mind that managing your own infrastructure entirely is both hard and tiring. I've done this for a long time myself and I speak from experience. Even if you've already decided, I'd suggest thinking this through carefully once again, because it would be quite hard to migrate back to Runtipi in case you wanted to.
In any case, I'll wish you a good migration π
The only thing I would suggest, is going without portainer then and use the cli to learn docker. Using portainer instead of tipi is only exchanging one abstraction with another one.
Portainer should be a dashboard for doing something more advanced
For example I use it to debug containers when I cannot ssh
Or delete unused images
True. But it sounds like @kiceg uses it for deploying / managing compose (migrating to). In that case you could just stay with tipi to begin with.
For debugging/ logging/ cli access you can now just use dozzle, way lighter for that π
I totally agree and I think Dockge might be a better fit for deploying stuff if you want a GUI
Portainer's compose implementation is really complicated and hard to debug