Greetings, Can the question of loading HAProxy configuration from multiple files be revisited once again?
The most useful implementation I've found so far is this: http://marc.info/?l=haproxy&m=129235503410444 Even though it's been a few years, that patch still cleanly applies to the latest HAProxy 1.4 and 1.5. At the time, it was rejected, and since then nobody has stepped up to address the concerns that were raised against it. As far as I understand, primary reasons this has not yet been merged or otherwise implemented were: 1) There's already a way to load configuration from multiple files by specifying multiple "-f" parameters on haproxy command line. My biggest concern with that approach is that you need an init script that is tailored to a specific layout of configuration fragment files, and may break or misbehave if its assumptions about the layout are not met. Multiply the number of possible layouts by the number of init systems (SysV init, upstart, systemd, OpenRC etc.) and making this reasonably generic becomes cumbersome, even before you consider supporting different Linux distributions. 2) HAProxy configuration is sensitive to the order of sections, and a fragment of a section placed at the wrong place can break all sorts of things. I think the best way to address this is to enforce additional validation on file fragments, e.g. require that any included file excplicitly associates each setting line with a section. In other words, it shouldn't have hanging setting lines that can end up being associated with a section from another file depending on the file sort order. Also, AFAIU specifying multiple configuration files on the command line exposes the same problem, so even merging this patch as is would at least not make things worse. 3) Unrestricted include directive allows to create an include loop. I believe that concern is already addressed by the patch linked above by setting a limit on the nesting level in the INCLUDE_RECURSION_LEVEL_MAX macro. Is there any other major problem I've missed? Thanks, -- Dmitry Borodaenko
