Support of DBless Kong

[StarlightIbuki]

It seems we could just do that with the /config endpoint?

[hbagdi]

@StarlightIbuki Could you please elaborate on what you would like decK to do?
Do you wish to use decK to push the configuration into a DB-less instance of Kong?

[StarlightIbuki]

@StarlightIbuki Could you please elaborate on what you would like decK to do? Do you wish to use decK to push the configuration into a DB-less instance of Kong?

Yes. Maybe there's some reason we do not support this?

[hbagdi]

That would make decK a "Control-Plane". We do not have plans to build a third Control-Plane for Kong.

[lgtti]

I want to add a real use case for this request.
In our organization we have our code splitted in different microservices with different git repositories. Every repostory own its Kong configuration.
Usually, we use a Kong Postgres database installation so we can use deck to sync the configuration using a CICD pipeline.

Now we have a customer that wants a local installation without a database.

Merge all files in a single one is not a problem but the file is only a template (using
${{ env DECK_VAR }} syntax. Without deck we need to replace all variables using a custom script and this is errore prone. In addtition deck requires a different format that the standard one $VAR to define a variable ${{ env "VAR" }} and this is more difficoult to manage with standard tools like envsubst.

I think it is not so difficoult to add a simple flag (--db-less) to inform deck to invoke /config instead using a different endpoint or logic.

[StarlightIbuki]

@lgtti Actually, I was thinking about something much simpler. Most functionality of decK does not need it to understand the internals of the kong and its config. We could support DBless without sync, and decK doesn't need to maintain states.
What you want may need decK to have a database or something, so it can remember what changes it has already seen.

[hbagdi]

Merge all files in a single one is not a problem but the file is only a template (using
${{ env DECK_VAR }} syntax. Without deck we need to replace all variables using a custom script and this is errore prone. In addtition deck requires a different format that the standard one $VAR to define a variable ${{ env "VAR" }} and this is more difficoult to manage with standard tools like envsubst.

Would it help if decK can take in all the files, merge them, resolve the variables if present and outputs the config file? You can then POST the file. This way, you get rid of the error-prone aspects and the focus of this project remains intact. What do you think?

[lgtti]

Yes, is exactly what i need

[cello86]

@hbagdi it could be a relevant improvement in a CI/CD local environment, because deck provides variables, plugin config deduplication and defaults configs natively as mentioned in #604