Migrating from bare metal to docker

[geomule]

Hi,

I've been using Paperless for a few years now and I'm really please with my workflow and this great piece of software. I have 1.5.0 installed on my Debian 11 server bare metal with Postgres as main DB. Data/media is stored on /mnt/share/paperless on the same machines. The time has come to wipe out the server and more to something more appropriate for may day to day usage model but before doing so I need to migrate services off this server. One is paperless that I want to move to a VM where I have successfully installed the Docker versions of Paperless 1.5.0.

There is a media folder in /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media for the VM. I suppose a simple rsync between the bare metal media folder to the VM media folder will sort out the migration of the data. Given my poor understanding of Docker, I'm also struggling to understand how I migrate the database. I know how to dump postgress but how do I get it into the VM container that is running postgress (BTW, I downloaded the correct yml file) so that I can upload the database?

I did the following:

root@vm101:~# docker images
REPOSITORY                  TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
postgres                    13        9a26a0154be3   6 days ago      373MB
redis                       6.0       ca73e0feb585   8 days ago      112MB
jonaswinkler/paperless-ng   latest    abaa6ea0f560   16 months ago   1.09GB

This suggests to me that the docker compose pull I did, actually pulled a redis and postgress image too from the Docker hub. So Paperless-ng container must be connecting to the postgress container somehow.

Any help on this please?

Once I get this step done, is that all that would be necessary for the migration?

[geomule]

UPDATE: 30/12/22
I've been trying to work this out in the meantime. I got postgres (bundled with paperless_ng) to open its port on the host VM by adding the following to docker-compose.yml:

ports:
      - 5432:5432

under the db section. Connecting to the database with $ psql -h 192.168.2.200 -p 5432 -U paperless I ran \l and got the following:

paperless-# \l
                                     Lista dei database
     Nome     | Proprietario | Codifica | Ordinamento |   Ctype    |  Privilegi di accesso   
--------------+--------------+----------+-------------+------------+-------------------------
 paperless    | paperless    | UTF8     | en_US.utf8  | en_US.utf8 | 
 postgres     | paperless    | UTF8     | en_US.utf8  | en_US.utf8 | 
 template0    | paperless    | UTF8     | en_US.utf8  | en_US.utf8 | =c/paperless           +
              |              |          |             |            | paperless=CTc/paperless
 template1    | paperless    | UTF8     | en_US.utf8  | en_US.utf8 | =c/paperless           +
              |              |          |             |            | paperless=CTc/paperless
(4 rows)

So a created a new database paperless_ng and added the new role paperless_ng with the following:

CREATE DATABASE paperless_ng;
CREATE ROLE paperless_ng;

I had to create the new role or the following command would kick errors complaining the paperless_ng role was missing. From the host machine, i then did the following so that I could dump the existing (working database) to the new VM paperless_ng installation:

sudo -u postgres pg_dump paperless_ng | psql -h 192.168.2.200 -p 5432 paperless -d paperless_ng

Everything seemed to work and got no errors from psql, although I note that psql is from Postgresql 11 on host machine while the docker installation is using Postgresql 13 (could this be a possible problem?).

I then shut down the container (docker compose down), edited the docker-compose.yml to use the paperless_ng database rather than the paperless one:

POSTGRES_DB: paperless_ng
POSTGRES_USER: paperless
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: paperless

I then did scp to copy the documents folder from the host machine to the VM in /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data ensuring that the permissions are the same. I did the same for the data folder in /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_data/_data.

I then pulled the container up with docker compose up -d. Got no errors. Tried to log in the first time and it didn't accept the paperless user password anymore (neither the host machine bare metal install nor the new one I had created yesterday for the docker installation). So I decided to run docker-compose run --rm webserver createsuperuser. I thought it would allow me to just change the paperless password but I had to create a new user paperless_ng user with the paperless. I can now log in using the paperless_ng but when I log in I see the empty install with no documents, as if the docker container was ignoring the fact that I set POSTGRES_DB: paperless_ng.

I'm a bit lost now. I thought that uploading postgres with the working database and copying over the documents and data folders would work. Clearly I'm missing a trick and it must be something associated with docker which I'm not familiar with. In the past, I migrated Paperless_ng from one bare metal install to another and it went smooth.

Any thoughts?