Promtail Packages

[DanCech]

Currently we don't have an easy way for anyone wanting to use standalone promtail to install it as a service on their host machine(s).

We should at least provide pre-built binaries, and ideally packages that can set up the services to run it at boot.

For starters we should provide .deb and .rpm packages.

[roidelapluie]

+1. Packages for promtail and Loki.

[jstoja]

This could be very useful when hitting (at least) an alpha release.

[roidelapluie]

more than packages ; alpha release on github would be handy; then we can packge it ourselves.

[davkal]

We'll start with releases in late May when Loki goes into Beta.

[candlerb]

Windows binaries too please (since those are always much more of a pain to build)

[Ehco1996]

try to build on 1GB RAM vps , but it always panic with OOM

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had any activity in the past 30 days. It will be closed in 7 days if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[aledegano]

@DanCech I believe this issue can be closed now.

[MalloZup]

I will work on this soonish. I might create rpm first also I might be that I could build Debian pkg (if needed) with obs https://openbuildservice.org/

We do already for other projects

[MalloZup]

My plan would be to pkg promtail and loki in different pkgs and create a systemd service to start stop agents. As a question what do you think about the configuration files directory?? Where should we put conf? E.g in existing etc/grafana or etc/loki and etc/promtail ?

[cyriltovena]

I'm rooting for etc/loki and etc/promtail

[MalloZup]

ok thx! sounds good to me

[MalloZup]

ok thx! sounds good to me

[MalloZup]

ok first RPM I have build for opensuse are here 🍏 https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/server:monitoring/loki.

I will need to play and experiment with this pkg and then I could update the pkgs to 0.3.0. Currenlty I have some issues with the golang pkg. I guess perhaps soemthing changed in the vendoring? orsoemthing between 0.1.0 to 0.2.0 I might neeed to check.

After that, I could investigate to provide pkgs for other distros

[Daniel15]

Are there any Debian packages available yet, or does that still need to be built out?

[cyriltovena]

We’re looking for help for debian.

[stefanotorresi]

ok first RPM I have build for opensuse are here https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/server:monitoring/loki.

just for future reference, the correct link ended up being https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/security:logging/loki

[wardbekker]

The Grafana Cloud Agent, which embeds promtail, does have packaging: https://github.com/grafana/agent/tree/master/packaging

This could be a good alternative.

[reedacus25]

In reference to "Go add a comment to that issue for which package managers you would like." from #3119

I think you can cast a really wide net with deb and rpm.
deb covers debian and ubuntu and downstream ubuntu dists, rpm covers rhel, centos/oracle, sles, opensuse, fedora.

[morph027]

We’re looking for help for debian.

Can jump in here...but i would not walk the hard way creating the debian package myself but using fpm instead. I'm using this for countless projects.

[matiasba]

We’re looking for help for debian.

There is already a guy generating deb packages automatically in this project https://github.com/growse/promtail-package/ maybe you can take a look a what he does

[morph027]

Looks like fpm ;) Good job!

[growse]

We’re looking for help for debian.

There is already a guy generating deb packages automatically in this project https://github.com/growse/promtail-package/ maybe you can take a look a what he does

Hi! That's me! Yes, just fpm. I host the result on my own apt repo, I should try and get round to adding the debs to github releases as well.

I also need to double-check the way in which they're getting built, because I've got this issue on arm: #3406 and I'm not sure if it's an issue with the code, or the build settings. More work needed...

[morph027]

We’re looking for help for debian.

There is already a guy generating deb packages automatically in this project https://github.com/growse/promtail-package/ maybe you can take a look a what he does

Hi! That's me! Yes, just fpm. I host the result on my own apt repo, I should try and get round to adding the debs to github releases as well.

I also need to double-check the way in which they're getting built, because I've got this issue on arm: #3406 and I'm not sure if it's an issue with the code, or the build settings. More work needed...

You can easily use Gitlab Pages for a repo ;) https://morph027.gitlab.io/blog/repo-hosting-using-gitlab-pages/

[growse]

Ah, interesting. As the README says, I currently host the packages on my own apt repo (https://apttoo.growse.com/). I should probably put Cloudflare or something in front of it in case lots of people suddenly start using it...

[scottcove]

This is a great idea. We predominantly use Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/Alma in our environment, so the following three package managers would be handy to support, and would cover off most needs, I'd say:

• apt (deb)
• yum
• dnf

This may warrant a separate issue, but at least providing the Linux binaries in a .tar.gz format would help a bunch for our (and probably others) needs, and I could see for others, where machines are highly packaged controlled. tar is pretty common in a distro, whereas unzip is not. Having the tarballs in a near-universal format would certainly help. For now, I'm converting them locally, and hosting them in an intermediate location that the version-controlled machines can get to.

[MurzNN]

@growse the https://apttoo.growse.com/ url isn't opening now with "Unable to connect" error, is this a temporary problem now with it?

[MurzNN]

Also we can use launchpad.net to publish repos with downloadable packages.

[growse]

@growse the https://apttoo.growse.com/ url isn't opening now with "Unable to connect" error, is this a temporary problem now with it?

It is IPv6 only, so I guess you're trying to connect over IPv4?

[matiasba]

Yeah I'm having the same problem as well. Sadly most of the ISPs in my country only give ipv4.

[gslin]

For IPv4-only environment, you may try to setup 6to4 so that you can connect to IPv6-only resources. btw, well, I also have built loki & promtail binaries (deb) in Launchpad PPA as well:

• https://launchpad.net/~gslin/+archive/ubuntu/grafana-loki

It's a minimal package (only binaries), so you need to configure other things (e.g. systemd service files) yourself.

[daurnimator]

FYI we package promtail (and the rest of loki) in ArchLinux: https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/promtail/
We add a systemd service file to run it at boot: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/loki/trunk/promtail.service

[rightaway]

Debian needs official promtail and loki packages so we can get security patches and start stop with systemd. There is already for grafana https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/next/setup-grafana/installation/debian/.

Anyone is working on this? @MalloZup @cyriltovena @davkal

[jeschkies]

There is a POC #6456