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I second this. It's incredible complex to debug how Traefik understand it's configuration, and also documentation and examples over the internet are very confusing because the version 1.x vs 2.x changes.

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Yep. I believe part of the wonkiness comes from the way the configuration is stored. They have this weird design where the config is mapped to key/value stores using an abstraction. You can use a TOML file, YAML file, Etcd, Redis, etc. If you use Let's Encrypt, it also uses this mechanism (e.g. Etcd) to store the state.

It ends up being confusing and brittle, and exposes the underlying store as an API (you can modify Etcd directly and the changes are picked up). There's no intermediate layer that validates or controls the lifecycle of the config or state. You can end up in a situation where you break Traefik by pushing an invalid configuration, for example.

Can't they just take the text based format and create a config tool that reads TOML/YAML and then writes that configuration to etcd, redis or whatever else they support?

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