How to locate/set compose file for stacks on remote Hawser environments?

[shakebox]

Testing Dockhand right now and being quite happy with it. Very good work!

I have one question:
I have 3 environments set up right now for 3 different hosts running docker. One is the local host where Dockhand is also running, working fine with "Unix socket" connection. And there are 2 additional ones setup with a Hawser (standard) connection. All these hosts have their docker compose files in subfolders of their local /opt folder, so like /opt/stackA/docker-compose.yml, etc.

With my first config of Dockhand when I pressed the "Browse for config file" button and pointed it to /opt, it was shown empty. Makes sense. Then I added a volume "- /opt:/opt" to my Dockhand docker-compose config and then when i used the Dockhand file browser it showed me the subfolders of this machine with the existing subfolders and I was able to select the config file for each stack.

BUT: how do I handle this for the Hawser environments? If I switch to one of them in Dockhand and try to use the "browse for config file" button, it still shows me the contents of /opt for the Unix-socket connected Dockhand host, not the /opt of the remote hawser host.

How can I set locations for config files for stacks on the remote machines?

Thx

[vici30]

As far as I understand, the compose files from the remote clients have to live where Dockhand lives. In other words, you have to copy/recreate them on the Dockhand machine, e.g. in /opt/, where you have the other ones. Then you can delete/ignore the compose files on the remote machines, as the ones managed by Dockhand will become the source of truth.
See documentation

[geeForceOne]

I love what dockhand has done so far, however having the compose file remote and not on the docker machine it resides has a very big drawback. If for some reason the machine where dockhand lives is down (for a longer period due to hardware failure for example), then it's impossible to manage the remote servers.
I would prefer if the compose file lives on the machine where the stack is. I liked how it was solved by dockge and i think this is the direction it should go. I would also prefer to have dockhand installed on both machines and talking to each as an additional remote connection type,

[MacBadger]

100%, not moving my compose file to anywhere else! redundancy of this is so important. Glad I saw this as it was last aspect i was trying to get working.

[bobdig]

I realized a real threat for my setup, just a novice, personal user of docker. That is, if the dockhand instance is inaccessible, non of my other hawser connected environments work either, like my mail server. I had moved the stack files to dockhand, for the looks, now I am moving them back on their hosts. I don't use any secrets management. Or did I miss something in the docs? Reading the changelog, I thought that this behavior had changed but it looks like only for backup purposes and not what I want.

[erdnuesse]

From the description I wouldn't think of any threat in the classical IT sense.
To the point: a tool can only control things it is going to get access to. Other dashboards can also be deployed to running docker stacks, but can't manage jack if the stacks aren't deployed from inside the tool.
That's how they work. Google single source of truth to learn more. Other tools exist too -> harvester, k8s, microcloud, openstack etc.