Feedback: cockroach start should always have --locality

[dweatherbee]

Douglas Weatherbee (dweatherbee) commented:

Page: [https://cockroachlabs.com/docs/v22.2/cockroach-start.html](https://cockroachlabs.com/docs/v22.2/cockroach-start.html]

What is the reason for your feedback?

[ ] Missing the information I need

[ ] Too complicated

[ ] Out of date

[ ] Something is broken

[x ) Other

Additional details

Our cockroach start page emphasizes using the --locality=region= flag in order to start nodes that will form a running CRDB cluster with Multi-region capabilities. This is correct but the the optionality of the --locality flag in any other situation makes it seem that --locality is only ever used unless you know up front that you're leveraging CRDB multi-region SQL and capabilities.

In the field the best practice is to always start CRDB nodes with a --locality flag. It's considered bad practice to start CRDB node without the --locality flag. Even if the CRDB nodes are all run in a single data center, they should be started on different racks for failover. Locality should be used to give each node a rack based location.

I learned about this from @sheaffej while researching for the CU multi-region course.

Jira Issue: DOC-6657

[exalate-issue-sync[bot]]

linville (mdlinville) commented: Thanks Doug, that’s super helpful context. I think this should be workable.