Best practices around strict mode configuration

[federicobond]

I recently discovered that uwsgi ignores unknown settings silently by default. This caught me by surprise, and sure enough, when I went to check some of my production configs, I discovered that I was using some directives that were not supported in the version of uwsgi I had installed.

@unbit reached out to me on twitter when I posted about this and pointed out that custom user-defined settings are widely used in uwsgi configs. He also showed me that custom settings can be defined with set / set-placeholder.

Given that there is an explicit method for defining custom settings, perhaps it would be wise to suggest new users to configure strict mode from the get-go so they can avoid problems with typos or unsupported directives. Some of the configuration settings in nginx have deep performance and security consequences, and strict mode can guarantee a much higher level of assurance than the current default.

What are your thoughts on this? Is there more we can do to prevent the scenarios mentioned above?