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Ask HN: What is the best config file documentation you have seen?

30 points by caarlos0 ↗ HN
I run a project called goreleaser, which is configurable via YAML.

Since it has a lot of options, it can get confusing. I do provide a JSONSchema and a documentation page, with all available options and some commented examples.

Still, I feel like it could be better - especially regarding informing in which version a given option was added, discoverability, etc.. I'm just not sure how to make it so.

That said, I wonder: what is the best software configuration documentation you have ever seen?

12 comments

[ 9.2 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread
ksaj
The config file for sendmail used to be really quite good. There were more lines of explanation than there were config items. There were numerous documented example lines describing several different, but common setups. There were explanations about why you may or may not want a particular line item. There was even a preliminary mailing list handler built into the config documentation, should you want to run such a thing. It was so well documented a beginner could edit it successfully, as long as they already knew how to get out of Vim.

This was quite a feat, considering most people only ever saw m4 language in sendmail configs. It's not very easy to read.

caarlos0
Oh, I’ll take a read! Thank you
llIIllIIllIIl
php.ini

Seriously, that is usually the easiest configuration i had to deal with. Although there are hundreds of configurable options, each one is thoroughly documented in the same file.

Yaml config, although being better structured, rarely have any comments with explanation, and I’m still waiting to see one documented at 30% of php.ini.

joshxyz
eslint config is great, you can use json or js or other formats, works well.
citrin_ru
Nginx config documentation is one of the best I've seen. Things I like which are not common: 1. It specifies in which version a feature was introduced (if it was not present if first public release) 2. It is easy to send a link pointing to description of a specific directive e. g. http://nginx.org/r/env 3. For each directive docs tell a default value. It seems obvious that any decent documentation should have this but I've seen software for which it is hard to find out default values so you have to add into config many values just in case even if they are not different from defaults.