Liftoff

Migrate Docker Compose stacks between servers with minimal downtime.

Liftoff analyzes your existing stack, creates an editable migration plan, and executes it with a live dashboard — handling volume sync, database dumps, service orchestration, and health checks automatically.

Features

• Interactive wizard — guided setup via liftoff plan, no config files to write manually
• Editable YAML plan — review and customize every step before execution
• Live dashboard — real-time progress with step tracking, progress bars, and logs
• PostgreSQL support — automatic dump and restore via pg_dumpall
• Volume sync — rsync-based with pre-sync (live) and final delta sync for minimal downtime
• Server validation — checks Docker, Compose, rsync, disk space, and permissions before starting
• Graceful failure handling — retry, skip, or abort on any step failure
• Plugin-ready architecture — adding new database or service migrators is a single file

Requirements

• Bun runtime (for development)
• SSH access to both source and target servers
• Docker and Docker Compose on both servers
• rsync on both servers

Install

Linux / macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docimin/liftoff/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Windows:

Download liftoff-windows-x64.exe from the latest release and add it to your PATH.

From source (requires Bun):

git clone https://github.com/docimin/liftoff.git
cd liftoff
bun install
bun build --compile src/index.ts --outfile liftoff
mv liftoff /usr/local/bin/

Usage

1. Create a migration plan

liftoff plan

The wizard walks you through:

• Connecting to source and target servers (validates SSH, Docker, permissions)
• Finding your docker-compose.yml
• Analyzing services, volumes, and databases
• Generating an optimized migration plan

The plan is saved to liftoff-plan.yml — you can edit it before running.

2. Review the plan

# liftoff-plan.yml
version: 1
source:
  host: root@old-server.de
  compose_file: /opt/nextcloud/docker-compose.yml
target:
  host: root@new-server.de
  compose_dir: /opt/nextcloud

steps:
  - name: Pre-sync volumes
    type: rsync
    live: true
  - name: Dump PostgreSQL
    type: postgres_dump
    service: nextcloud-db
  # ... more steps

3. Execute the migration

liftoff run

A live dashboard shows progress for each step. If anything fails, you choose: retry, skip, or abort.

4. Verify (optional)

liftoff verify

Re-runs the health checks from your plan to confirm everything is working.

How it works

Your machine
  └── liftoff CLI
        ├── SSH → Source server (analyze, dump, stop)
        └── SSH → Target server (restore, start, verify)

Liftoff is agentless — nothing is installed on your servers. All operations happen over SSH.

Migration phases:

1. Pre-sync — rsync volumes while the source stack is still running
2. Database dump — pg_dumpall via docker exec
3. Cutover — stop source, final delta sync, start database on target, restore dump
4. Start — bring up the full stack on target
5. Verify — container and HTTP health checks

Development

bun install
bun test          # run all tests
bun run dev       # run the CLI in dev mode

Adding a new database migrator

All migrators implement the same interface and are registered in a central registry:

1. Create src/migrators/mysql-dump.ts implementing the Migrator interface
2. Register it in src/migrators/registry.ts
3. Add detection logic in src/analyzer/database-detector.ts

License

MIT