Configure a Grafana Docker image

If you are running Grafana in a Docker image, then you configure Grafana using environment variables rather than directly editing the configuration file. If you want to save your data, then you also need to designate persistent storage or bind mounts for the Grafana container.

Save your Grafana data

If you do not designate a location for information storage, then all your Grafana data disappears as soon as you stop your container. To save your data, you need to set up persistent storage or bind mounts for your container.

Run Grafana container with persistent storage (recommended)

# create a persistent volume for your data in /var/lib/grafana (database and plugins)
docker volume create grafana-storage

# start grafana
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name=grafana -v grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana grafana/grafana

Run Grafana container using bind mounts

You may want to run Grafana in Docker but use folders on your host for the database or configuration. When doing so, it becomes important to start the container with a user that is able to access and write to the folder you map into the container.

mkdir data # creates a folder for your data
ID=$(id -u) # saves your user id in the ID variable

# starts grafana with your user id and using the data folder
docker run -d --user $ID --volume "$PWD/data:/var/lib/grafana" -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana:7.2.1

Default paths

The following settings are hard-coded when launching the Grafana Docker container and can only be overridden using environment variables, not in conf/grafana.ini.

Logging

Logs in the Docker container go to standard out by default, as is common in the Docker world. Change this by setting a different log mode.

Example:

# Run Grafana while logging to both standard out and /var/log/grafana/grafana.log
docker run -p 3000:3000 -e "GF_LOG_MODE=console file" grafana/grafana

Configure Grafana with Docker Secrets

Only available in Grafana v5.2 and later.

It’s possible to supply Grafana with configuration through files. This works well with Docker Secrets as the secrets by default gets mapped into /run/secrets/<name of secret> of the container.

You can do this with any of the configuration options in conf/grafana.ini by setting GF_<SectionName>_<KeyName>__FILE to the path of the file holding the secret.

For example, you could set the admin password this way:

• Admin password secret: /run/secrets/admin_password
• Environment variable: GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD__FILE=/run/secrets/admin_password

Configure AWS credentials for CloudWatch Support

docker run -d \
-p 3000:3000 \
--name=grafana \
-e "GF_AWS_PROFILES=default" \
-e "GF_AWS_default_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY" \
-e "GF_AWS_default_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_SECRET_KEY" \
-e "GF_AWS_default_REGION=us-east-1" \
grafana/grafana

You may also specify multiple profiles to GF_AWS_PROFILES (e.g. GF_AWS_PROFILES=default another).

Supported variables:

• GF_AWS_${profile}_ACCESS_KEY_ID: AWS access key ID (required).
• GF_AWS_${profile}_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: AWS secret access key (required).
• GF_AWS_${profile}_REGION: AWS region (optional).