Ability to specify a config_dir in the -config-file

[keyneston]

It would be useful from an operations point of view if when running you could just specify the -config-file. Then in the -config-file you could define a config_dir.

This way you can have your consul agent configuration in a file, for example /etc/consul.json, and your service/check configuration in a directory, e.g. /etc/consul.d/.

[mitchellh]

The way Ubuntu standardizes on this sort of thing is having a "defaults" file such as /etc/defaults/consul that just exports raw flags to run. For example, a defaults file for Consul might look like:

export CONSUL_FLAGS="-consul-dir /etc/consul.d"

Then in your service you can do

. /etc/default/consul
consul ${CONSUL_FLAGS}

That is the approach I prefer to take with ops. Its also just as easy to template the service file to have the proper configuration directory.

I think having both a config-file and config-dir might be confusing for users since one would only be able to contain the directory. I think the above approach is better, but we'll defer to @armon.

[armon]

I agree with @mitchellh on this one. I think usually its either a config file or config dir, and it's rather confusing to have one link to the other.