This is documentation for the next version of Alloy. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.
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 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:sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false alloy
Create a service file in
/etc/systemd/system
calledalloy.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/
calledalloy
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:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Use the Linux systemd commands to manage your standalone Linux installation of Alloy.