Gitea under Configuration Management: Generated and Static Settings

Question

I need to set up a Gitea server for an organization. The setup itself is easy, and I managed to bring up Gitea within an hour when installing it manually.

However, my organisation uses a configuration management tool, which handles secrets and configuration settings. So the idea is that I create /etc/gitea/app.ini using a configuration file template.

But when I run the Gitea setup, additional values are created, such as JWT tokens (JWT_SECRET in the [oauth2] section of the config file), which I clearly cannot make up before Gitea is up and running.

So on one side, I need to pre-define the app.ini, on the other hand, I need Gitea to control app.ini. But when my provisioning script runs, it will overwrite those settings.

Is it possible to split up those two sets of settings over multiple configuration file: one to pre-define statically, and one to be managed by Gitea?

Answer 1

It turns out the JWT has only a "not valid before" date and therefore doesn't need updates. So it works fine with a single config file.