After I read enough to gain some working knowledge of how to use InfluxDB, it was time to get hands-on. And the first decision to make is: what version? The InfluxDB project made a major version breaking change not that long ago. And older projects like the Raspberry Pi Power Monitor project is still tied to the 1.x lineage of InfluxDB. Since this is an experiment, I would keep the footprint light by running InfluxDB in a Docker container. So when I looked on InfluxDB's official Docker repository I was puzzled to see it had only 1.x releases. [Update: 2.x images are now available, more details below.] Looking around for an explanation, I saw the reason was because they did not yet have (1) feature parity and (2) a smooth automatic migration from 1.x to 2.x. This could mean bad things happening to people who periodically pull influxdb:latest from Docker Hub. While this problem was being worked on, InfluxDB 2 Docker images are hosted on quay.io/influxdb/influxdb instead of Docker hub.

I found it curious Docker didn't have a standard mechanism to hold back people who are not ready to take the plunge for a major semantic version change, but I'm not diving into that rabbit hole right now. I have no dependency on legacy 1.x features, or a legacy 1.x database to migrate, or code using the old SQL-style query language. Therefore I decided to dive in to InfluxDB 2 with the knowledge I would also have to learn its new Flux query language that looks nothing like SQL.

Referencing the document Running InfluxDB 2.0 and Telegraf Using Docker, I quickly got a bare-bones instance of InfluxDB 2 up and running. I didn't even bother trying to persist data on the first run: it was just to verify that the binaries would execute, and that the network ports were set up correctly so I could get into the administration UI to poke around. On the second run I mapped a volume to /root/.influxdbv2 so my data would live on after the container itself is stopped. Now all I need to do is to get some data to store!

[Update: After InfluxDB Docker Hub was updated to release version 2 binaries, the mapped volume path changed from /root/.influxdbv2 to /var/lib/influxdb2. See the InfluxDB Docker Hub repository for details under the section titled: Upgrading from quay.io-hosted InfluxDB 2.x image. In my case it wasn't quite as straightforward. The migration was introduced in InfluxDB 2.0.4, but I got all the way up to 2.1.1 from quay.io before I performed this migration. A direct switch to 2.1.1 did not work: it acted as if I had a new InfluxDB instance and didn't have any of my existing data. Trying to run 2.0.4 would fail with a "migration specification not found" error due to a database schema change introduced in 2.1.0. Fortunately, running 2.1.0 docker image appeared to do the trick, loading up all the existing data. After that, I could run 2.1.1 and still keep all my data.]

Docker compose file I used to run 2.1.1 image hosted on quay.io, data stored in the subdirectory "mapped" which is in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file:

version: "3.8"

services:
  server:
    image: quay.io/influxdb/influxdb:2.1.1
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8086:8086
    volumes:
      - ./mapped/:/root/.influxdbv2/

Update: here's the version to use latest Docker hub image instead:

version: "3.8"

services:
  server:
    image: influxdb:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8086:8086
    volumes:
      - ./mapped/:/var/lib/influxdb2/