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Run Grafana Alloy as a standalone binary

If you downloaded the standalone binary, you must run Alloy from a terminal or command window.

Refer to the run documentation for more information about the command line flags you can use when you run Alloy.

Start Alloy

To start Alloy, run the following command in a terminal or command window:

shell 
<BINARY_PATH> run <CONFIG_PATH>

Replace the following:

  • <BINARY_PATH>: The path to the Alloy binary file.
  • <CONFIG_PATH>: The path to the Alloy configuration file.

Set up Alloy as a Linux systemd service

You can set up and manage the standalone binary for Alloy as a Linux systemd service.

Note

These steps assume you have a default systemd and Alloy configuration.

  1. To create a user called alloy run the following command in a terminal window:

    shell 
    sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false alloy

  2. Create a service file in /etc/systemd/system called alloy.service with the following contents:

    systemd 
    [Unit]
Description=Vendor-neutral programmable observability pipelines.
Documentation=https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Restart=always
User=alloy
Environment=HOSTNAME=%H
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/alloy
WorkingDirectory=<WORKING_DIRECTORY>
ExecStart=<BINARY_PATH> run $CUSTOM_ARGS --storage.path=<WORKING_DIRECTORY> $CONFIG_FILE
ExecReload=/usr/bin/env kill -HUP $MAINPID
TimeoutStopSec=20s
SendSIGKILL=no

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

    Replace the following:

    • <BINARY_PATH>: The path to the Alloy binary file.
    • <WORKING_DIRECTORY>: The path to a working directory, for example /var/lib/alloy.

  3. Create an environment file in /etc/default/ called alloy with the following contents:

    shell 
    ## Path:
## Description: Grafana Alloy settings
## Type:        string
## Default:     ""
## ServiceRestart: alloy
#
# Command line options for alloy
#
# The configuration file holding the Grafana Alloy configuration.
CONFIG_FILE="<CONFIG_PATH>"

# User-defined arguments to pass to the run command.
CUSTOM_ARGS=""

# Restart on system upgrade. Defaults to true.
RESTART_ON_UPGRADE=true

    Replace the following:

    • <CONFIG_PATH>: The path to the Alloy configuration file.

  4. To reload the service files, run the following command in a terminal window:

    shell 
    sudo systemctl daemon-reload

  5. Use the Linux systemd commands to manage your standalone Linux installation of Alloy.

View Alloy logs

By default, Alloy writes the output to stdout and errors to stderr.

To write the output and error logs to a file, you can use the redirection operator for your operating system. For example, the following command combines the standard output and standard errors into a single text file:

linux 
<BINARY_PATH> run <CONFIG_PATH> &> <OUTPUT_FILE>
macos 
<BINARY_PATH> run <CONFIG_PATH> &> <OUTPUT_FILE>
windows 
<BINARY_PATH> run <CONFIG_PATH> 1> <OUTPUT_FILE> 2>&1

Replace the following:

  • <BINARY_PATH>: The path to the Alloy binary file.
  • <CONFIG_PATH>: The path to the Alloy configuration file.
  • <OUTPUT_FILE>: The output filename.