On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 15:01:34 -0700, Greg Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sorry, but I very much disagree. I think back to the old days of access.conf, httpd.conf, and srm.conf. As an administrator, I absolutely detested that layout. I could NEVER figure out which file a given configuration was in. I always had to search, then edit.
We've been to the "multiple .conf world" before. It sucked. We pulled everything back into a single .conf to get the hell outta there.
Small examples are fine. The default configuration should remain as a single .conf file.
After a few years of running moderate-sized virtual hosting servers
(2 to a few hundred) I've settled in on a multiple-file organization for virtual hosts.
I use the usual httpd.conf for server-wide settings, but that includes "vhost.conf" which contains a bunch of virtual host containers that then include configuration files for the various virtual hosts. These days I tend to create a set of directories, like
/www/sites/vhost-1.com
which then have logs, htdocs, and other supporting directories. What's nice about this is that vhosts are easily portable from one server to another. I've got a script that automatically punches in a new vhost, so I can have one up and running in two minutes.
My big project these is a site with a database that's still useful in read-only mode when the database goes down; it's got mirror sites and all kinds of funny details, and we have a "runlevel.conf" symlink that points to one of several files that let us adapt the system to various degraded states such as database maintainance, software upgrade, etc.
That same site also has several test instances, and we have a single configuration file that has all the variables that change between different instances, so it's easy to maintain the conf files in CVS.
There are good operational reasons to split up configuration in different files -- if the Apache install can encourage good practices, based on the decade of experience we've had with it, that's a good thing.
