A simple CLI utility for importing and exporting dashboards as JSON using the Grafana HTTP API.

This can be used for:

• Backing up your dashboards that already exist within your Grafana instance, e.g. if you are migrating from the internal SQLite database to MySQL.
• Updating dashboard files for your Infrastructure-as-Code for use with Grafana dashboard provisioning.
• Making tweaks to dashboard JSON files directly and updating Grafana with one command.

• Mirrors the folder structure between a local set of dashboards and Grafana, creating folders where necessary.
• Ensures links to dashboards folders in a dashlist Panel are consistent with the Folder UIDs - useful for deploying one set of dashboards across multiple Grafana instances, for instance across environments.

For detailed command help, see the full help text with the --help option.

It is important to note that the admin login username and password are required, and its selected organization must be correct, if you are accessing the API using --username and --password. Alternatively, a provided API Key must have admin permissions if you are accessing the API using --token.

A Dockerfile is provided. To build and run:

docker build -t grafana-dashboard-manager:latest .
docker run grafana-dashboard-manager --help

Install via pip:

pip install grafana-dashboard-manager

Install dependencies and run with Poetry

cd /path/to/grafana-dashboard-manager
poetry install
poetry run python ./grafana_dashboard_manager --help

The intended workflow is:

1. Download dashboards and to a local directory or version control system for backup and change control.
2. Replicate across multiple Grafana installs or restore a previous install by uploading the saved dashboards.

These examples use docker run commands, but the commands are the same regardless of run method.

Download dashboards using the Grafana admin user:

docker run grafana-dashboard-manager \
    download \
    --scheme https \
    --host my.grafana.example.com \
    --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD \
    --destination /path/to/dashboards/

Download dashboards using a Grafana admin API Key:

docker run grafana-dashboard-manager \
    download \
    --scheme https \
    --host my.grafana.example.com \
    --token $API_KEY \
    --destination /path/to/dashboards/

Upload dashboards using the Grafana admin user, to a local instance for testing

docker run grafana-dashboard-manager \
    upload \
    --scheme http \
    --port 3000 \
    --host localhost \
    --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD \
    --source /path/to/dashboards/

Upload dashboards using a Grafana admin key without any user prompts:

docker run grafana-dashboard-manager \
    upload \
    --scheme http \
    --port 3000 \
    --host localhost \
    --token $API_KEY \
    --source /path/to/dashboards/

• The scheme is https and port is 443 by default. If your Grafana is not hosted with https on 443, the scheme and port needs to be specified using the --scheme and --port options respectively.
• If you use self signed certs on the Grafana server or otherwise don't want to validate an HTTPS connection, use --skip-verify although this is not recommended.
• The version of the dashboard is removed of the json files in order to allow overwriting and creation of dashboards as new.
• URL encoding of strings is handled by httpx and so characters such as / in folder names is supported.
• When uploading, setting the home dashboard from the home.json file can be disabled with the option --skip-home.

• Does not support the experimental nested folders in Grafana. Only one level of folders is supported.
• Does not support multi-organization deployments.