Deployment

Deployment

Binary install on the host is still supported. A typical production setup:

1. Cross-compile the binary for the target OS/arch.
2. Install the binary and config on the host (e.g. /opt/log-forwarder/).
3. Ensure the service user can read configured log paths.
4. Point sink.kafka.brokers at your production cluster (or switch sink.type to file / http-noauth).
5. Run under a process supervisor such as systemd:

[Unit]
Description=Log Forwarder
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=logforwarder
WorkingDirectory=/opt/log-forwarder
ExecStart=/opt/log-forwarder/log-forwarder -config /opt/log-forwarder/config.yaml
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

For custom transformers or enrichers, deploy the binary built from your own entrypoint (e.g. ./examples/custom) instead of ./cmd/log-forwarder.

Fleet monitoring with log-forwarder-atc

To track many forwarders from a central dashboard, run log-forwarder-atc alongside your agents and set atc.enabled: true in each config. See Log Forwarder ATC for setup on both repos, probe requirements, and failure behavior.