Viewing the current configuration, after defaults and overrides have been applied

[modulitos]

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Ory Network Project

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Describe your problem

As a Kratos administrator or developer, I want to view the configuration for my running application, so that I can more easily observe the system.

I'm looking at the Kratos config here: https://www.ory.sh/docs/kratos/reference/configuration I understand there are various ways to override the default values via env vars as well as the --config path/to/config.yaml flag. But how can I see the "current running config" for my Kratos instance? There doesn't seem to be a way.

For example, I'm troubleshooting an issue where Kratos is behaving as if selfservice.allowed_return_urls isn't being set. I want to verify whether that's correctly configured to help me debug.

This feature would also be useful when triaging support requests, so that users can easily upload their current config along with a bug report.

This issue applies to the Hydra application as well.

Describe your ideal solution

We can implement an HTTP endpoint (eg: /admin/status) which returns the configuration for that service. It would help debug whether a config value has been correctly overridden, or replaced with a default value, etc.

Here's an example of the /status endpoint that Grafana uses for one of their products: https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/api_docs/#status

Workarounds or alternatives

Alternatively we can update the CLI to output the current config, but it seems less convenient since it requires shelling into the server.

A workaround, in place of this feature, is to rely on log statements to understand the config's state. But it's often preferable to view the whole config in one place.

Another workaround is to view the config values from the traces, as mentioned here: https://github.com/ory/kratos/discussions/3027#discussioncomment-4705182 But I'm not sure if that covers all config values, or if that feature is actually working.

Version

1.0.0

Additional Context

Link to my post on the Ory Community Slack, which inspired this issue: https://ory-community.slack.com/archives/C012RJ2MQ1H/p1699554528567839

I'm also open to implementing this feature! If these requirements sound reasonable, then maybe we can discuss a high-level approach as a next step.

Related discussion that this feature would resolve: https://github.com/ory/kratos/discussions/3027