A little known fact about Erlang's sys.config

If you ever wondered how to deploy Erlang releases with ability to override their configuration per node/region/whatever, enjoy this little gem hidden in config documentation:

When traversing the contents of sys.config and a filename is encountered, its contents are read and merged with the result so far.

Let's make a quick example of how it works.

Assume our release kernel is equipped with the following config file:

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[{kernel, [
           {inet_dist_listen_min, 10000},
           {inet_dist_listen_max, 10015},
           {database_for_example_purposes, "db://0.0.0.0:8080"}
          ]}].

And assume database_for_example_purposes is something that's specific to the deployment target, while we can afford the luxury of provisioning the environments with, let's say /etc/region.config. Of course that key doesn't belong to the kernel application and it's only here for example_purposes.

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[{kernel, [
           {database_for_example_purposes, "db://prod-host-omg:8081"}
          ]}].

All we need to do is to do is to include /etc/region.config by putting a string at the end of our release config file, so The Mustache of Release Configuration will pick it up.

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[{kernel, [
           {inet_dist_listen_min, 10000},
           {inet_dist_listen_max, 10015},
           {database_for_example_purposes, "db://0.0.0.0:8080"},
          ]},
    "/etc/region.config"].

Let's check out if it works:

$ erl -config releases/1/sys
Erlang R16B02 (erts-5.10.3) [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [async-threads:10]
[kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.10.3  (abort with ^G)
1> application:get_all_env(kernel)
[{database_for_example_purposes,"db://prod-host-omg:8081"},
 {inet_dist_listen_min,10000},
 {inet_dist_listen_max,10015},
 {included_applications,[]},
 {error_logger,tty}]

Et voilà.

12 December 2014