Run Grafana Alloy as a standalone binary

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

Start Alloy on Linux, macOS, or FreeBSD

To start Alloy on Linux, macOS, or FreeBSD, run the following command in a terminal window:

<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.

Start Alloy on Windows

To start Alloy on Windows, run the following commands in a command prompt:

<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.

To create a new user called alloy run the following command in a terminal window:
shell
```
sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false alloy
```

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

[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.

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

## 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.

To reload the service files, run the following command in a terminal window:
shell
```
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
```
Use the Linux systemd commands to manage your standalone Linux installation of Alloy.