Dapr sidecar (daprd) overview

    Dapr uses a sidecar pattern, meaning the Dapr APIs are run and exposed on a separate process (i.e. the Dapr sidecar) running alongside your application. The Dapr sidecar process is named daprd and is launched in different ways depending on the hosting environment.

    When Dapr is installed in , the daprd binary is downloaded and placed under the user home directory ( for Linux/MacOS or %USERPROFILE%\.dapr\bin\ for Windows). In self-hosted mode, running the Dapr CLI run command launches the daprd executable together with the provided application executable. This is the recommended way of running the Dapr sidecar when working locally in scenarios such as development and testing. The various arguments the CLI exposes to configure the sidecar can be found in the .

    In most cases you do not need to run daprd explicitly, as the sidecar is either launched by the CLI (self-hosted mode) or by the dapr-sidecar-injector service (Kubernetes). For advanced use cases (debugging, scripted deployments, etc.) the daprd process can be launched directly.

    For a detailed list of all available arguments run daprd --help or see this table which outlines how the daprd arguments relate to the CLI arguments and Kubernetes annotations.

    1. Start a sidecar along an application by specifying its unique ID. Note is a required field:

    2. If you are using several custom components and want to specify the location of the component definition files, use the --components-path argument:

    3. Enable collection of Prometheus metrics while running your app