How to Migrate Away from Dokku

The first move in any change to Dokku is the least exciting one: make a complete copy of your data and put it somewhere the product cannot touch. Frustration is exactly the state in which people skip this step, and it is the step that decides whether a migration gone sideways costs you an afternoon or costs you the work itself. Independent copy first, everything else second.

What you can get out of Dokku, and in what format, decides how painful the rest of this is. Export before you cancel anything, access to your own data often ends with the subscription, and free tiers are no exception when an account lapses. Check the product's own export or data-download page for the formats it offers, and pull the widest, most open one available rather than a format only it can read.

The useful way to shortlist against Dokku runs backwards from the obvious one: name the single thing you cannot give up before you open any list of rivals, then hold every other hosting & deployment option against that one line. Dokku concentrates on self-hosted-paas and docker, so a genuine alternative either serves that same need more precisely or covers ground Dokku leaves open. Research two candidates properly rather than skimming eight, because a shortlist you have actually tested beats a long list you only read about. Our comparison pages cover named hosting & deployment rivals in more detail when you reach that stage.

Run the import as a rehearsal before you run it for real: pick a small slice that represents the whole, the awkward records as well as the tidy ones, and bring only that into the new hosting & deployment tool first. Inspect how it landed, fix the mapping while the volume is tiny, and only then commit the rest, because a structural error at full scale is expensive to unwind and trivially cheap to catch on a sample.

Assumption is what loses data at this stage, so replace it with checks before Dokku gets shut down: match the numbers between old and new, open the files or records that actually matter to you rather than a random few, and confirm nothing you depend on was dropped quietly along the way. The old account should outlive the migration itself, keep it, even on a reduced plan, until the new tool has proven itself under real work.