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:shellsudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false alloy
Create a service file in
/etc/systemd/system
calledalloy.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
.
Create an environment file in
/etc/default/
calledalloy
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.
To reload the service files, run the following command in a terminal window:
shellsudo systemctl daemon-reload
Use the Linux systemd commands to manage your standalone Linux installation of Alloy.