Hi @mindgonemad, thanks for this complete explanation, it gives a pretty good context!
Given this context, it totally makes sense to choose swarm and why you need the volume access.
A few elements to help you:
- The easiest: retrieving logs from a docker swarm stack is done with the command
docker service logs <stack name>. If you add the flag-f(short version of--follow), you can even follow it in real time in your terminal. You can read more on this here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/service/
Example:
docker stack deploy -c portainer.yml portainer
docker service logs portainer_portainer
- For accessing the volume:
- If you can access directly to the machine where the volume is (either the only swarm node you have, or any machine of the swarm node if you setup rexray successfully), then you can find the volume's data by default in
/var/lib/docker/volumes/<volume id>/_data. If it is not there, use the commanddocker volume inspect <volume id>to retrieve the full path instead
(ref. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/volume_inspect/). - Alternatively, there is the "dockerize everything" pattern, where you even use a docker container for running your backup (or your interactive commande line to peek in the data), with the volume attached:
- If you can access directly to the machine where the volume is (either the only swarm node you have, or any machine of the swarm node if you setup rexray successfully), then you can find the volume's data by default in
docker stack deploy -c portainer.yml portainer
# Stack is deployed, with the volume referenced as "portainer-data"
# This volume is named after the stack and its reference in the docker-compose.yml file
# so retrieve the full name with:
docker volume ls # Named is "portainer_portainer-data" here
# Start an interactive and ephemeral container to browse the data in the volume:
docker run --rm -ti -v portainer_portainer-data:/DATA alpine:3.10 sh
> ls -l /DATA # Check content of volume
# Start a container that will backup the data to a remote server using rsync:
docker run -d -v portainer_portainer-data:/DATA backup_container rsync -av /DATA/ admin@backup-server:/backups/DATA/
I was able to finish installation of portainer using your configuration and disabling user authentication + let's encrypt, locally on my Docker4Mac. Can you check the logs of the portainer service with the command line I gave you earlier so we can check together what is going wrong in your setup (I assume something related to the data volume on your VPS)?