Reconmap config improvements

(Photo by Antonio Vivace on Unsplash)

The Reconmap team is busy at work with one thing in mind and one thing only. This thing is not adding new fancy features, or redesigning the whole UI, or integrating with the latest AI agents.
The main and only thing we have in mind right now is getting Reconmap to a point where is easy to setup, easy to troubleshoot and easy to maintain.

It's tempting to keep adding features to products, but our users appreciate a robust and reliable product more than one that is full of features that break when they most need them.

This post is about configuration, and the improvements that we have made in this area are many:

• Consistency. Our architecture has many components: the API, the Web UI, the CLI tool, the agent, amongst others. Each one of these components were using config in different ways: JSON files, JS files, ENV variables. Not only this, they were also naming identical config sections in different ways. This was a nightmare for anyone trying to familiarise with the solution. We now moved all config files to JSON and adopted a common set of naming conventions that make things easier to follow.
• Correctness. We added JSON schemas to validate the configuration files, so that any invalid entry is reported straight-away, saving some previous time and avoiding headaches.
• Framework agnostic. The Web UI component for instance used to have a config file with a lot of setting names starting with VITE_. This of course was important to make things work but it was leaking internal framework decisions to the user without any benefit. Starting with the latest release all setting names have a description that tells nothing about how the application is written.
• Standard. The previous versions of the Rmap and Reconmapd tools were saving config files to ~/.reconmap (on Linux) which was correct many years ago but stopped being correct since the standardisation of the ~/.config directory. The new version of these commands is saving the configuration files in ~/.config/reconmap.

And that's all for now! It's strange that some people find pleasure on tidying up config files but we are not the typical bunch. We are hackers, inventors, perfectionists, and a bit quirk as well :D

Learn more about us on the Reconmap Github organisation