Re: Proposal: pg_confcheck - syntactic & semantic validation of postgresql configuration files

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Amir Rohan <amir(dot)rohan(at)zoho(dot)com> wrote:
> In addition to a simple syntax check, there's a bunch of "config wisdom"
> tidbits I've encountering, which is scattered through talks, commit
> messages, and mailing list discussion, and documentation notes
> (chapter 17, paragraph 12). These could be collected into a tool that:
>
> - Checks your configuration's syntax
> - Checks for semantically legal values ('read committed' not
> 'read_committed' )
> - Warns of unrecognized keys ("'hot_standby' is not a valid GUC in v9.1").
> - Is version-aware.
> - Serves as an "executable" form of past experience.
> - Describes the config problem in a structured way (as an expression,
> for example)
> - Includes a friendly, semi-verbose, description of the problem.
> - Describes ways to fix the problem, *right there*.
> - Is independent from server (but reuses the same parser), particularly
> any life-cycle commands such as restart.

Sounds reasonable. I don't know whether or not we would accept this
into core, but I can certainly see it being a worthwhile effort. I'd
expect to spend a lot of time figuring out which rules you want to
enforce.

> - Quoting rules for recovery.conf and postgresql.conf are different

I believe this is no longer true.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company