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doc: add note on precedence of options in bitcoin.conf #16448

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Jul 31, 2019
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doc: add note on precedence of options in bitcoin.conf #16448

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15 changes: 15 additions & 0 deletions doc/bitcoin-conf.md
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Expand Up @@ -30,6 +30,21 @@ Network specific options can be:
- placed into sections with headers `[main]` (not `[mainnet]`), `[test]` (not `[testnet]`) or `[regtest]`;
- prefixed with a chain name; e.g., `regtest.maxmempool=100`.

Network specific options take precedence over non-network specific options.
If multiple values for the same option are found with the same precedence, the
first one is generally chosen.

This means that given the following configuration, `regtest.rpcport` is set to `3000`:

```
regtest=1
rpcport=2000
regtest.rpcport=3000
[regtest]
rpcport=4000
```
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@jonatack jonatack Jul 24, 2019 •
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Should you decide that comments in the example configuration are a good idea, here is one (entirely optional) version for your consideration:

regtest=1
rpcport=2000          # Non-network specific `rpcport` option
regtest.rpcport=3000  # 1st network specific `rpcport` option -> value chosen by the parser

[regtest]
rpcport=4000          # 2nd network specific `rpcport` option

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I feel like adding comments would make this pretty noisy, however will leave this up to if anyone else thinks they should be added.

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I know this PR has been merged now but I would have liked more comments here as @jonatack suggested. I didn't understand what was going on. I understand there is a trade-off between informing less experienced users and minimizing noise for more experienced users. Perhaps when the minimizing noise option is chosen a Bitcoin StackExchange page can be set up to include those comments. Resources like Jameson Lopp's Bitcoin Core config generator tool are useful too. Though whether you'd want to provide a link to these resources from within a config file or in a comment within the codebase I don't know...

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I guess it's better to make a new PR at this point; replying on a deeply nested comment on a merged PR isn't going to make much of a difference

Though whether you'd want to provide a link to these resources from within a config file or in a comment within the codebase I don't know...

Would personally prefer to keep it more or less self-contained, external links might change and tend to go stale.

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Ok, understood. Thanks


## Configuration File Path

The configuration file is not automatically created; you can create it using your favorite text editor. By default, the configuration file name is `bitcoin.conf` and it is located in the Bitcoin data directory, but both the Bitcoin data directory and the configuration file path may be changed using the `-datadir` and `-conf` command-line options.
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