---
title: "Arguments and exports | Grafana Labs"
description: "How a component block is written, and its inputs and outputs"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

Section 4 · Reading Alloy configuration

How a component block is written, and its inputs and outputs

Estimated time: 1 min

## Arguments and exports

Every component has two main parts:

- **Arguments** configure the component’s behavior. They are the attributes and nested blocks you write inside the component block.
- **Exports** are values that the running component makes available for other components to reference. You don’t write exports in the configuration; the component type provides them.

A component can have zero or more exports, and optional arguments can have defaults.

Recall the `local.file` example:

Alloy ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```alloy
local.file "example" {
  filename = "/tmp/example.txt"
}
```

Here, `filename` is an argument that tells `local.file` which file to read. The `local.file` component also provides a `content` export, which holds the latest contents of that file.

## Connecting components

When one component uses another component’s export as an argument, that reference connects the two. These connections are how components become the pipelines that collect, process, and send telemetry.