Installation settings

An installation’s settings live in its database, and an administrator edits all of them in the dashboard. A config file is where they start.

The config file seeds

On AWS, the file is installation_config in Terraform:

module "spin" {
  # ...
  installation_config = file("installation.yaml")
}

When the control plane starts, it creates each item of the file that the installation does not have yet: a setting, a preset, a network policy. From then on, the dashboard is where they change.

When the file later says something different about an item, the control plane does not write over what an administrator decided. It records the difference as a proposal, and the dashboard shows it with Apply and Dismiss. An item the file stops declaring becomes a proposal to delete it; nothing is removed without an administrator deciding. A dismissed proposal stays hidden until the file changes again.

This is how a new release’s defaults reach an installation that already runs: as proposals, not as surprises.

Check a file before you apply it:

controlplane config check installation.yaml

The whole file, with the comment on every field, is in the config file reference.

What it holds

The installation’s settings, who may register, the sizes a workspace may be created with, and the network policies it may run under. Each block, with every field and its default, is in the config file reference, written from the example file the control plane’s own test reads.

On AWS the module adds what it knows itself: the domain, which machines join as runners, and the autoscaling settings.

Settings only the dashboard has

Some settings are not in the file. In Admin → Security and Admin → Settings:

• Sign-in providers: GitHub and OIDC. See Users and teams.
• Session length: seven days by default, at most fourteen.
• Sharing: whether snapshots may be shared (on by default), and whether ports and snapshots may be made public (off by default).
• Rate limits on sign-in and on the API.
• Telemetry: which traces and metrics are kept. See Observability.