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Before any parcels can be sorted, the receiving office has to exist first: the building must be there, the desk staffed, and the doors open. Only then does it make sense to send couriers out to collect anything. Loki follows the same order — the server must be running and listening before any agent ships a single log line.
An illustration of a small "RECEIVING" storefront with two delivery workers standing at the entrance. A line connects the shop to a floating panel labeled "Loki server" under the title "Installing Loki Locally."
In practice that means: first install and start the Loki server locally, then point your logs/agents at it. Loki is designed to be lightweight for local development — it ships as a single binary with a single configuration file. There is no external database to provision, so getting a local instance running is straightforward.
A minimalist slide titled "One binary, one config file" showing a blue rounded box labeled "loki BINARY" with a downward arrow pointing to it and a green check mark.
Quick steps to get a local Loki running
  • Download the Loki binary for your OS from the official releases.
  • Create a configuration YAML file for local operation.
  • Start Loki with the config: ./loki -config.file=loki-local-config.yaml
  • Point your log shipper (promtail, fluentd, Vector, etc.) to http://localhost:3100.
What the minimal config does
  • The server block sets the HTTP and gRPC listener ports. By default, Loki serves its HTTP API on 3100 and a gRPC listener commonly on 9095 or 9096.
  • The common block configures local disk layout (e.g. path_prefix: /tmp/loki) and uses replication_factor: 1 because this is a single-node local setup.
  • schema_config selects the TSDB index schema, here set to v13.
  • object_store: filesystem keeps all data in a local directory. For production, use object stores such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage.
  • auth_enabled: false disables authentication so requests are allowed without credentials — suitable for local testing but not for production.
Configuration summary Example minimal config (loki-local-config.yaml)
This configuration is intended for local development and learning. For production deployments, use a durable object store (S3/GCS/Azure Blob), increase replication, enable authentication/multi-tenancy, and follow best practices for high availability and retention.
Links and references

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