All programs should tell you where they store config files

wet_lettuce@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 757 points –
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I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can't tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.

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Start your application / program with “strace” and see all the files it opens.

Also run “lsof” on a running process to see what files it has open.

Or use inotifywait from inotify-tools. It logs acces <type> to specified file/folder.

Interesting. I have not heard of this tools. But you say specified file or folder, that means you already know the file location?

You can call it recursively on .config (for instance), and watch for specific events (creation, deletion, modification, etc). But I expect this to be expensive on really large folders and I'd avoid it if I could.

Btw it's syscalls iirc (inotify-tools just exposes them)

I doubt that's a linux problem. All apps store config in /etc, ~/.*rc or ~/.config

Everything else should be considered a bug (looking at you, systemd!)

Check out the Lemmy install docs

well, lemmy is a webapp.

Those usually store config in some www/htdocs/config dir. Lemmy does aswell and offers LEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATION to override.