De-docker Grafana Installation

While docker is a fantastically powerful tool, as it turns it out, it’s not perfect for everything everywhere. I ran into this recently and needed to move my Grafana setup from the docker container back to a bare-metal environment. There wasn’t any one thing in particular, it was more of many small issues I was tired of dealing with and the final straw was setting up email alerts.

This was eventually accomplished by a few steps:

  1. tarball grafana’s files in the container
  2. copy tarballs to bare metal server
  3. ensure no file conflicts
  4. untar the files to bare metal

The list of files I needed before everything was moved over properly are:

  • /var/lib/grafana/
  • /etc/grafana*
  • /usr/share/grafana/

This pulled all installed plugins, all the dashboards I had setup, the users, ect. Everything.

Then be sure to disable auto-start of the docker container (leave it for awhile before actual removal, just in case something is missing that isn’t immediately obvious) and ensure the bare metal installation is started at system boot.