Configuration files with CockroachDB?

[dianasaur323]

The only way we found to configure a server was via specifying command-line arguments (i.e. no configuration files). This is not a particularly easy mechanism in my opinion, and will inevitably lead to people coming up with custom config file structures that they parse with a bash script to populate the arguments for CockroachDB (I ended up doing something similar). It’s particularly painful if you want to specify arguments like this: --store=path=/mnt/hda1,size=20GB,attrs=hdd:7200rpm. Are there any plans to do file-based server configuration?

** Note: this is a copy of a community asked question on a different communication channel

[andrei]

No current plans that I’m aware of.
The topic did come up before in the “Packaging CRDB for Ubuntu” thread - if we had configuration files, it’d also be beneficial for running crdb under systemd and such service management tools as the tools could restart the service at will without worrying about arguments.

Packaging CRDB for Ubuntu

fwiw, there is an issue tracking this as well: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/11783

[knz]

The reason why configuration files are not offered is that it would actually increase operational complexity, as there would then be non-trivial questions about the relative priority of the parameters specified in the config file vs. command-line arguments.

Arguably, if you write a shell script and put configuration flags in there, that shell script becomes your configuration file.

[rmloveland]

FWIW I was just wondering about this too. In general, I would much rather edit a configuration file a la Postgres than write a script to pass CLI arguments (even though I have done so since currently I must).

Rather than seeing it as an either/or situation, I tend to think of it as a “long tail”/“both-and” situation, as in: If MySQL and Postgres and Oracle let me use config files, why does this new thing not let me? Users like features and convenience.

Re: precedence, I agree it’s more complex, but it looks like others have tackled this and it’s working for their users.

(Looks like some talk of config files via https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/3680 but that issue seems a little long in the tooth so it seems non-imminent)