Install Grafana Agent Flow on macOS

Grafana Agent Flow can be installed on Intel and Apple Silicon macOS machines.

Before you begin

Ensure that Homebrew is installed on your machine.

Install

To install Grafana Agent Flow on macOS, perform the following steps:

Add the Grafana Homebrew tap by running the following command in a terminal window:
```
brew tap grafana/grafana
```
Install the Grafana Agent Flow formula by running the following command in a terminal window:
```
brew install grafana-agent-flow
```

Operation guide

After installing Grafana Agent Flow on macOS, it will be exposed as a launchd service.

Run Grafana Agent Flow

To run Grafana Agent Flow, run the following command in a terminal:

brew services start grafana-agent-flow

After running this command, Grafana Agent Flow will be running as a service and will automatically run on system startup.

To check the status of Grafana Agent Flow, run the following command in a terminal:

brew services info grafana-agent-flow

Configuring Grafana Agent Flow

To configure Grafana Agent Flow when installed on macOS, perform the following steps:

Edit the default configuration file at $(brew --prefix)/etc/grafana-agent-flow/config.river.
Run the following command in a terminal to restart the Grafana Agent Flow service:
```
brew services restart grafana-agent-flow
```

Configuring the Grafana Agent Flow service

NOTE: Due to limitations in Homebrew, customizing the service used by Grafana Agent Flow on macOS requires changing the Homebrew formula and reinstalling Grafana Agent Flow.

To customize the Grafana Agent Flow service on macOS, perform the following steps:

Run the following command in a terminal:
```
brew edit grafana-agent-flow
```
This will open the Grafana Agent Flow Homebrew Formula in an editor.
Modify the service section as desired to change things such as:
- The configuration file used by Grafana Agent Flow.
- Flags passed to the Grafana Agent Flow binary.
- Location of log files.
When done, save the resulting formula file.
Reinstall the Grafana Agent Flow Formula by running the following command in a terminal:
```
brew reinstall grafana-agent-flow
```
Restart the Grafana Agent Flow service by running the command in a terminal:
```
brew services restart grafana-agent-flow
```

Exposing the UI to other machines

By default, Grafana Agent Flow listens on the local network for its HTTP server. This prevents other machines on the network from being able to access the UI for debugging.

To expose the UI to other machines, complete the following steps:

Follow Configuring the Grafana Agent Flow service to edit command line flags passed to Grafana Agent Flow, including the following customizations:
1. Modify the line inside the service block containing --server.http.listen-addr=127.0.0.1:12345, replacing 127.0.0.1 with the address which other machines on the network have access to, like the network IP address of the machine Grafana Agent Flow is running on.
  To listen on all interfaces, replace 127.0.0.1 with 0.0.0.0.

Viewing Grafana Agent Flow logs

By default, logs are written to $(brew --prefix)/var/log/grafana-agent-flow.log and $(brew --prefix)/var/log/grafana-agent-flow.err.log.

If you followed Configuring the Grafana Agent Flow service and changed the path where logs are written, refer to your current copy of the Grafana Agent Flow formula to locate log files.