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Add a config flag for ED to customize the location of config.json

Open pmaier1 opened this issue 1 year ago • 2 comments

Your use case

What would you like to do?

Add a config flag for ED to customize the location of config.json such that it can point to the one exposed by ESS. This way the admin can live edit it using e.g., admin console or other hooks. Customer admins can set the flag via their ED installer (e.g., MSI).

Why would you like to do it?

  • There are certain configurations that administrators will set in ESS (example)
  • For EW we can just change config.json on-the-fly :heavy_check_mark:
  • Currently there is no (simple) way to automatically propagate them to ED since ED relies on a hardcoded local config.json (if I'm not mistaken)

How would you like to achieve it?

The idea is that there would be something like a build flag (e.g., in MSI for Windows) such that administrators can roll out ED with a pre-configured location for config.json. This way we imagine that changes in ESS will automatically propagate to ED instances.

@daniellekirkwood @langleyd

Have you considered any alternatives?

No response

Additional context

No response

pmaier1 avatar Oct 01 '24 15:10 pmaier1

By location do you mean system file path or do you mean web URL? If the latter we'd need designs for the state for when the config cannot be loaded. I guess we'd need that if the config file was missing on the filesystem too.

Related https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/issues/731 Related https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/13678

t3chguy avatar Oct 01 '24 15:10 t3chguy

@pmaier1 @t3chguy does https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/pull/1921 solve this?

Half-Shot avatar Oct 18 '24 07:10 Half-Shot

In my opinion yes and we also avoid building different packages for different configuration paths.

davidegirardi avatar Oct 28 '24 09:10 davidegirardi

Sounds like this was done by @Half-Shot 's PR. Feel free to re-open if the requirement is not met @pmaier1

langleyd avatar Sep 12 '25 12:09 langleyd

Thanks! I don't fully remember the context of this ask.

cc @benbz @gaelgatelement for visibility

pmaier1 avatar Sep 15 '25 07:09 pmaier1