Does Loki needs to be running as a container to use the Alloy docker plugin?

Hi,

I have installed Alloy via the Linux method to collect logs from Caddy. Now I want to collect the logs from inside Docker and installed the Loki plugin according this manual Docker driver client | Grafana Loki documentation but get the error:
docker plugin enable loki Error response from daemon: dial unix /run/docker/plugins/c7ac36ddf5ff0b2a9b2f265321040879cadc3b6a52e292851b68cef784ed655e/loki.sock: connect: no such file or directory

So, does Loki installed via the Docker method an/or can it be run simultaneously with the Linux installation?

I don’t use the Docker driver myself, but you don’t need Loki running as container. I think you most likely have a misconfiguration somewhere.

Personally I prefer to use Alloy, and configure it to read from Docker logs directory.