Migrating Grafana in Docker from SQLite to Postgres

Because the documentation that people refer to no longer mentions external databases at all, and the old documentation which tells you to use GF_DATABASE_URL doesn’t work, and migrations are painful…

Configure postgres and Grafana

compose.yml

services:
  graphdb:
    image: postgres:17
    ports:
      - 5435:5432
    volumes:
      - /data/grafana/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=dummy
  graph:
    image: grafana/grafana:10.4.2
    volumes:
      - /data/grafana:/var/lib/grafana
    environment:
      - GF_PATHS_CONFIG=/var/lib/grafana/grafana.ini

/data/grafana/grafana.ini

[database]
url = postgresql://postgres:dummy@graphdb/grafana

Directly translating sqlite tables into postgres tables doesn’t work, so we need grafana to create its own tables:

docker compose up -d graphdb
docker compose exec graphdb psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U postgres -c 'create database grafana;'
docker compose up -d graph

Once we have a postgres database with empty tables, we can migrate the data:

graph.load

load database
  from sqlite:///data/grafana/grafana.db
  into postgresql://postgres:dummy@localhost:5435/grafana
  with data only, reset sequences
  set work_mem to '16MB', maintenance_work_mem to '512 MB';

pgloader graph.load

2025-04-17 00:00:00 -0500

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