Is it possible to run Traefik in Docker Swarm without mounting the docker socket? let's say I use Consul as backend provider or catalog and register the containers myself. Traefik doesn't need to know if containers are being started or removed by using the socket?
If you're using Traefik's Consul KV or Consul Catalog providers, then you do not need to enable the Docker provider.
Traefik will obtain list of routes and endpoints based off of the configuration as registered in Consul, not based on the labels attached directly to Docker containers.