You're viewing documentation for the legacy version of Firezone, now End-of-Life. View the latest docs here.

Migrate from Omnibus to Docker

Chef Infra Client, the configuration system Chef Omnibus relies on, has been scheduled for End-of-Life in 2024. Firezone 0.7 will be the last version to offer Omnibus-based deployments. Users are encouraged to migrate to a Docker-based deployment of Firezone using this guide.

Existing Omnibus-based deployments of Firezone will continue to function as-is, but no officially supported RedHat or Debian packages will be published for Firezone 0.8 and above.

See this GitHub issue tracking discussion for more details.

Follow this guide to migrate from an Omnibus-based deployment to a Docker-based deployment. In most cases this can be done with minimal downtime and without requiring you to regenerate WireGuard configurations for each device.

Heavily customized deployments (such as those using an external database or custom reverse proxy) will likely need extra troubleshooting and manual steps taken to perform a successful migration.

Take a look at the migration script source to get a detailed idea of the steps involved.

Estimated time to complete: 2 hours.

Steps to migrate

  1. Back up your server. This ensures you have a working state to roll back to in case anything goes terribly wrong. At a bare minimum you'll want to back up the file and directories Firezone uses , but we recommend taking a full snapshot of your VPS if possible.
  2. Ensure you're running the latest version of Firezone. See our upgrade guide if not.
  3. Install the latest version of Docker and Docker Compose for your OS. Docker Compose version 2 or higher is required. We recommend using Docker Server for Linux. Docker Desktop will work too, but is not preferred for production use cases at this time because it rewrites packets under some conditions and may cause unexpected issues with Firezone.
  4. Download and run the migration script:
bash <(curl -fsSL https://github.com/firezone/firezone/raw/legacy/scripts/docker_migrate.sh)

This will ask you a few questions, then attempt to migrate your installation to Docker. If all goes well, your Firezone instance should be running with Docker, data intact.

Rolling back

If anything goes wrong, you can abort the migration by simply bringing the Docker services down and the Omnibus ones back up:

docker-compose down
sudo firezone-ctl start

If you've found a bug, please open a GitHub issue with the error output and any steps needed to reproduce.


Need additional help?

Try asking on one of our community-powered support channels:

Or try searching the docs: