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Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it interesting that of the major Web servers IIS is the only one with a programmatic configuration API.

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generating and modifying unix config files programmatically has been happening for nearly half a century

the only reason a web daemon has an API in windows is because the windows registry is opaque, error-prone and in general, a giant piece of shit.

IIS configurations are stored in web.config and other XML files that are easily editable.

Nothing easy about editing a couple thousand line xml file. Especially when it's on the server and you have to do it with notepad.

Which is why IIS has a GUI tool to do it, and with .NET you can edit the configuration with a few lines of code.

It being on the server precludes opening an IDE?

That said, I agree that it would be better if it isn't a thousand lines, and maybe there are better options than XML.

The company I work for is a Microsoft shop (for now, switching to Java sadly), and I've edited a lot of web.configs in servers, sometimes using Notepad, and it wasn't much of a hassle (though I did have to research what to edit beforehand in some cases).

You have IDEs installed on your production servers...?

My comment was refuting the parent's comment that IIS needed a GUI because it used the Windows Registry to store configuration information.

Yes, because the registry is terrible. If the registry were any good, IIS configuration would use it, and you'd be able to programmatically reconfigure IIS, or any other program, in a standard registry-based way.

I have never configured an IIS server. Do you find that the programmatic configuration API is helpful? I rarely find httpd.conf or nginx.conf to be difficult to manage, but it's possible that we're missing out on a good thing in the OSS world. It's been known to happen.

I built a system that generated IIS configuration XML files, and a script to apply/import them on any/all servers in an array. It worked, and was substantially better than using the supplied GUI, but still inferior to editing nginx conf files by hand. These days I wouldn't touch IIS with a [very long object].

IIS 7.5 / 8 is pretty good. Some cool features in 8.

Anything below 7.5 I hope I never have to touch again...

Instead of killing worker processes that exceed the CPU throttle, like in IIS 7, those processes are simply throttled in IIS 8.

I use jinja templates to generate nginx config files. I don't need yet another proprietary API with its own quirks and interoperability problems.

Have you looked at Auegas? I've used it quite a lot from within puppet to make well-structured changes to Apache config files.

That's Augeas. ( http://augeas.net/ ) It takes some getting used to (some files are much easier to manage with plain old sed), but it's quite a cool and useful tool. Puppet and Kickstart are good use cases.

Does a shell/python script that writes a httpd.conf file count as a configuration API?

I think so...IIS 8 can be auto-configured in several scripting languages, including powershell, c#, etc.

I think it reflects the general Microsoft philosophy of having APIs for everything. After all, they are an API company. It shows in the PowerShell design with it's object API approach.

Also, with the API you should be able to configure IIS without restarting it, while changing web.config recycles web apps (in ASP.NET scenario). With load-balancing, however, this is less of an issue.

Simple text parsing + service restart obviates the need for an API. The shell is your API.

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