This guide walks you through the process of downgrading Portainer from Enterprise Edition to Community Edition in a Docker Swarm environment.


Prerequisites

  • Docker Swarm cluster with Portainer EE installed
  • Access to the manager node
  • Administrative privileges

Step-by-Step Downgrade Process

⚙️ Step 1: Take a Backup

📦 Backup your Portainer data and store it in a safe location before making any changes.

This ensures you can restore your instance if anything goes wrong.
Example:

docker run --rm -v portainer_data:/data -v $(pwd):/backup busybox tar czf /backup/portainer_backup.tar.gz /data


🧱 Step 2: Stop Existing Portainer Business Instance (Standalone Mode)

🛑 Shut down the existing Portainer Business (EE) container.

docker stop <portainer_id>


🐳 Step 3: Scale Down the Portainer Service (Swarm Mode)

If you are running Portainer in Docker Swarm, scale down the service to 0 replicas.

docker service scale portainer=0


🔄 Step 4: Downgrade the Portainer Database

Use the following command to downgrade the Portainer database to be compatible with the Community Edition (CE).

Replace portainer_data with your actual Portainer data volume or bind mount.

docker run -it --name portainer-database-rollback \

-v portainer_data:/data \

portainer/portainer-ee:latest \

–rollback-to-ce


🚀 Step 5: Redeploy Portainer CE (Swarm Mode)

After downgrading the database, redeploy Portainer Community Edition and reuse the existing Portainer Business data.


docker service create \
--name portainer \
--publish 9000:9000 \
--publish 9443:9443 \
--constraint 'node.role == manager' \
--mount type=bind,source=/dockerswarm/data/portainer_ee,target=/data \
--mount type=bind,source=/var/run/docker.sock,target=/var/run/docker.sock \
portainer/portainer-ce:latest

🛰️ Step 6: Deploy the Portainer Agent

Deploy the Portainer Agent service across all nodes in the Swarm.
This allows Portainer CE to communicate with and manage Docker nodes.


docker service create \
--name portainer_agent \
--network portainer_agent_network \
--mode global \
--publish 9001:9001 \
--mount type=bind,source=/var/run/docker.sock,target=/var/run/docker.sock \
portainer/agent:latest


The --mode global flag ensures the agent runs on every node in the Swarm cluster.

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| Happy Splunking 😉