What volumes should I mount when using Docker?

Grafana
1

First of all, the documentation I’m reading for Docker setup is really really bad:

Basically there’s VERY little mention of how to set up the bind mounts / volume mounts for data persistence here. I’m simply using Docker Compose to host Promtail + Loki + Grafana in my home lab setup. I just wanted something simple, not an enterprise or complex setup. Each time I bring down my containers and start them up again, the data inside that container is wiped out and I lose all my settings. Of course, because there’s no volumes or directories mounted.

A few things I tried:

  • In Grafana, mount /var/lib/grafana to persist changes made in the web UI
  • In Grafana and other apps, try mounting /etc/grafana (similar paths for loki and promtail) to get the INI/YAML files for configuration, but these files are NOT created if these directories are mounted. I get permissions errors in Grafana’s case.

I think the above last point is more important in the Promtail/Loki case since they require the YAML configuration files to even start, but it’s unclear from the documentation if I should be mounting /etc/promtail or use /mnt/config as they do in the documentation.

I’ll provide my final YAML below, can anyone help me understand if I am setting this up properly? The mounts I got by trial and error mostly.

version: "3"

networks:
  loki:

services:
  loki:
    image: grafana/loki
    # restart: unless-stopped
    user: $DOCKER_UID:$DOCKER_GID
    command: -config.file=/mnt/config/config.yml
    networks:
      loki:
    ports:
      - 3100:3100
    volumes:
      - ./loki:/mnt/config
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Chicago

  promtail:
    image: grafana/promtail
    # restart: unless-stopped
    # user: $DOCKER_UID:$DOCKER_GID
    command: -config.file=/mnt/config/config.yml
    networks:
      loki:
    ports:
      - 9080:9080
    volumes:
      - ./promtail:/mnt/config
      - /var/log:/var/log:ro
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Chicago

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana
    user: $DOCKER_UID:$DOCKER_GID
    networks:
      loki:
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    volumes:
      - ./grafana/data:/var/lib/grafana
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Chicago

Eventually, I’m going to want Promtail to monitor other log files mounted from other containers, as well as container logs themselves, and I’m not sure if I need to do all of this in a single Promtail container (I’d end up adding a bunch more bind mounts) or if you create 1 Promtail container for each app.

Thanks in advance for helping me get started.

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