Overview of the configuration tool

why? what? and basic questions answered about the configuration tool

This is the first blog of a series of blogs, giving the reader a complete understanding of the configuration tool and how important it is to increase efficiency and upheave business value to the company

In this article we will discuss the following topics:

• what is a configuration tool ?
• how does the tool work?
• what are the importance of the tool?

What is the configuration tool?

It is a tool created to automate the application of configurations to different installers. Before the user make use of the tool it is salient to create a meta.yaml file.This file would hold all the configuration that will be changed by the tool.The meta.yaml file will named and committed as ‘.metadata’ to the git repository for future needs.

Meta.yaml file has two sections

• Params: Is a list of all the command line parameters that is applied at tool runtime.These are specific for the WSO2 product
• Files: files section list down all the needed configurations and comprise of :

1. file_path: this is the file location in git location, so these configuration values should be applied to the product packfiles
2. relative_path: the file that will be changed when the configuration tool is executed
3. file_type: the tool is able to change several type of files.to name some as xml,yaml,text,.sh files
4. Configurations: after this heading all the required configuration values will be listed

How does the tool work?

The configuration tool needs two inputs namly the above discussed metadata file received from git clone of the product repository and product pack saved in the tool location in a products directory. when the above requirements are fulfilled the user is able to run the tool.

what are the importance of the tool?

There are many advantages of the tool, the main business value comes in terms of time efficiency.albeit, the initial .metadata creation could be time consuming but in later configuration changes already created .metadata file comes in handy with only slight tweaks to incorporate . Tool works efficiently for version and configuration changes. Let discuss more extensively about the tool in other consecutive blogs. Till then Keep Smiling :)