Installing Promtail on ubuntu

Install Promtail

Adding Repo

PROMTAIL_VERSION=$(curl -s “https://api.github.com/repos/grafana/loki/releases/latest” | grep -Po ‘”tag_name”: “v\K[0-9.]+’)

Create a new directory for storing Promtail binary and configuration file.

sudo mkdir /opt/promtail

Run the following command to download Promtail archive from releases page of the Loki repository.

sudo wget -qO /opt/promtail/promtail.gz “https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v${PROMTAIL_VERSION}/promtail-linux-amd64.zip”

Extract binary file from archive:

sudo gunzip /opt/promtail/promtail.gz

Set execute permission for extracted file:

sudo chmod a+x /opt/promtail/promtail

We can create a symbolic link to the promtail command in /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo ln -s /opt/promtail/promtail /usr/local/bin/promtail

Now promtail can be used as a system-wide command for all users.

Download configuration file for Promtail:

sudo wget -qO /opt/promtail/promtail-local-config.yaml “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/loki/v${PROMTAIL_VERSION}/clients/cmd/promtail/promtail-local-config.yaml”

Check Promtail version to verify that the installation completed successfully:

promtail -version

Run Promtail as a service

We can configure systemd to run Promtail as a service. Create a systemd unit file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/promtail.service

Add the following content:

[Unit] Description=Promtail client for sending logs to Loki After=network.target [Service] ExecStart=/opt/promtail/promtail -config.file=/opt/promtail/promtail-local-config.yaml Restart=always TimeoutStopSec=3 [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start Promtail service:

sudo service promtail start

You can execute the following command to make sure that Promtail service is running:

sudo service promtail status

Also you can stop or restart the service:

sudo service promtail stop sudo service promtail restart

To enable Promtail to start on boot, run the following command:

sudo systemctl enable promtail