gem-hunter

There are some forks of the project that have been kept more up-to-date that you can consider:

1. https://github.com/rl0nergan/grafana-db-migrator/tree/feat/sanitize-booleans
   1. This fork was from one of my coworkers, includes massive performance improvements, and was used in 2026 to migrate our [very large] SQLite Grafana DBs
2. https://github.com/percona/grafana-db-migrator
   1. The rl0nergan repo above is a fork of Percona's fork of this repo
   2. Percona knows more than me about databases. I'd trust them.

My blog post

I ran into the issue of Grafana logging users out because the SQLite database was locked and tokens couldn't be looked up. This is discussed in #10727 on grafana/grafana. The solution is to migrate to a database that isn't the default one of SQLite.

You must already have an existing database in Postgres for Grafana.

Run CREATE DATABASE grafana in psql to make the database. Then, start up an instance of Grafana pointed to the new database. Grafana will automagically create all the tables that it will need. You can shut Grafana down once those tables are made. We need those tables to exist for the migration to work.

Tested on:

usage: Grafana SQLite to Postgres Migrator [<flags>] <sqlite-file> <postgres-connection-string>

A command-line application to migrate Grafana data from SQLite to Postgres.

Flags:
  --help       Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
  --dump=/tmp  Directory path where the sqlite dump should be stored.

Args:
  <sqlite-file>                 Path to SQLite file being imported.
  <postgres-connection-string>  URL-format database connection string to use in the URL format (postgres://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST/DATABASE).

1. Build docker image: docker build -t grafana-sqlite-to-postgres .
2. Run migration: docker run --rm -ti -v <PATH_TO_DB_FILE>:/grafana.db grafana-sqlite-to-postgres /grafana.db "postgres://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@<HOST>:5432/<DATABASE_NAME>?sslmode=disable"

This is the command I used to transfer my Grafana database:

./grafana-migrate grafana.db "postgres://postgres:PASSWORDHERE@localhost:5432/grafana?sslmode=disable"

Notice the ?sslmode=disable parameter. The pq driver has sslmode turned on by default, so you may need to add a parameter to adjust it. You can see all the support connection string parameters here.

1. Dumps SQLite database to /tmp
2. Sanitize the dump so it can be imported to Postgres
3. Import the dump to the Grafana database

Inspiration for this program was taken from

• haron/grafana-migrator
• This blog post