Use admin friendly configuration tools

[dmarteau]

Lizmap RFC: [ADMIN] Use admin friendly configuration

Date 2019/08/21

Author David Marteau (@dmarteau)

Version Lizmap-Web-Client4

Summary

Lizmap should be Admin/devops friendly and work seemlessly with provisional and deployment tools (ansible etc....).

Proposed Solution

Configuration files should be well identified

Configuration files should be well identified depending on their roles: use separate files for projects/repository, theming, log configs or use include directive in config files enabling splitting the config in differents parts for easier deployment (see nginx config for example)

Configuration files should switch to YAML or JSON

More expressive and easier to handle with high-level languages

Users and projects must be configurable with server side API

This may be a cli tool or an http REST API (favor a REST API for administration)

Affected Files

Configuration files, configuration api.

Backwards Compatibility

None, Lizmap 4 must provide a migration tool to upgrade configuration files.

Votes

(required)

[rldhont]

Use Jelix 1.7 to fix it

[laurentj]

We should implements some cli commands (using Symfony Console, like in Jelix 1.7), to manage system configuration of Lizmap.

[laurentj]

Configuration files should switch to YAML or JSON

No, because :

• To parse YAML efficiently, a binary extension must be installed. And it's not an official extension of PHP. (using a parser in pure PHP is not an option, too slow)
• The syntax of YAML, for "normal" users, is more complex than a simple ini file. Honestly, I had difficulties for years to know how to represent a list of simple values and a list of properties, differences between them is stupid in YAML. Many things are stupidely complex in YAML. Proof: specifications of YAML syntax is bigger than specifications of XML !
• Benchmarks I made show that parsing an ini file is much much much faster than parsing YAML (because of its huge specifications), and much faster to parse than pure PHP configuration file.
• JSON is not a format to store configuration data (for humans) because adding comments is impossible. Comments in a configuration file is a requirement.

So I 'm not in favor to change the configuration file format of Jelix/Lizmap.

Ini file are:

• simple to write, to understand for any users
• comments are possible
• faster to parse
• simple to modify with an external tool, even with regexp (this is not the case of JSON, because it may not have return line between values, nor in YAML because it depends how the author of the file choose to represents properties)
• there are already tools in Jelix to modify very simply ini files (I will made a patch in the docker configuration to use these tools instead of using regexp..)