Inspired by Holger Just's haproxy configuration tool I decided to write one my own that worked better for my setup and haproxy_join was born. It's a simple Ruby script that allows you to break up a monolithic haproxy configuration file in to pieces.
haproxy_join expects files and directories to be in the following scheme:
HAPROXY_PATH/conf/global.cfg (file)
HAPROXY_PATH/conf/defaults.cfg (file)
HAPROXY_PATH/conf/frontend.cfg (file)
HAPROXY_PATH/conf/frontend.d (dir of frontend configs)
HAPROXY_PATH/conf/backend.d (dir backend configs)
The HAPROXY_PATH and resulting configuration file are specified when running the haproxy_join command. On most systems it would look like the following, all you need to do is break up your current config and put it in the above structure.
haproxy_join haproxy.cfg /etc/haproxy/
haproxy_join will also attempt to backup your configuration file before writing a new one.
This works great in tandem with a tool like Chef, allowing you to have Chef manage each small configuration file with a template and haproxy_join to concatenate them together each time they are changed. You can achieve this by using a Chef recipe based on the default opscode haproxy recipe and a slightly modified haproxy init script based on Holger Just's haproxy init script. The recipe will notify haproxy Chef to restart haproxy if a configuration has changed and the init script will run haproxy_join before it restarts haproxy. I have posted an example of the cookbook recipe and the init script. Neither of these have been heavily used/tested so try them out before you put them into production.
Hope this helps anyone with large haproxy configurations. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
