--config-dir not working when runing under wsgi container

[Thomas Bechtold]

When running ceilometer under apache (or uwsgi) it is no longer possible to specify sustom --config-file / --config-dir parameters (or any other CLI option).

[Thomas Bechtold (toabctl)]

No deprecation timeframe? No suggestion howto move forward if you rely on that? Great experience...

[Julien Danjou (jdanjou)]

Hi Thomas,

Nothing has changed as it always has been this way – or I misunderstood your bug report. There never was any way provided by Aodh/Ceilometer to specify a config-file/dir when using an external WSGI server. So I don't see any "deprecation" path to create/maintain here.

Best,

jd

[Thomas Bechtold (toabctl)]

Hi Julien,

afaiu previously the eventlet based server was the one proposed to use in production. With that, the CLI options where available. Now the eventlet based server is no longer suggested in productions envs but switching to something else is not possible if you need the config-dir option.

[Julien Danjou (jdanjou)]

Hey Thomas,

Actually, Ceilometer/Aodh dropped eventlet usage 2 or 3 cycles ago already, so the [aodh,ceilometer}-api tool provided were based on the simple WSGI server provided by Werkzeug. Maybe it was badly documented, but using that in production never has been the best proposed solution – nothing compares to the performance, options and experience that Apache or uwsgi might have.

The wrapper now that we use is even simpler than Werkzeug so we are even less recommending to use that in production indeed. Keystone followed the same path.

I don't know any way of providing any equivalence of command line option to a WSGI app, except by creating your own WSGI file. We've been shipped a default one for a while now, but it's free to be edited and to have your own CLI options passed in it. That should work – or it would be a bug.

I imagine it could be more documented, or probably that some pointer to existing documentation (handling WSGI app is pretty generic), but as you may noticed the Ceilometer/Aodh documentation are in a pretty bad shape and we lack volunteers to help with improving (or even writing) them.

[Thomas Bechtold (toabctl)]

So I went ahead and created https://review.openstack.org/#/c/400667/ . With that we would have at least some default config dirs.