Remiges Rigel is an open source product which runs on servers and maintains a central repository of configuration variables and their values. Rigel runs only on Linux, and uses the Linux etcd system to maintain a replicated database of these values. The full source code can be downloaded from Github: see here, here and here.
This blog carries announcements, policy statements, etc, about Rigel.
What is Remiges Rigel?
Remiges Rigel is an open source product which is very useful for large enterprise business applications. Any large business application has some quasi-static configuration parameters which are expected to change periodically. Ideally, these changes should be possible without requiring any code change or build-test-deploy cycle. In the 20th century, such parameters were kept in configuration files, like Java property files. Rigel is far more effective for maintaining such configuration parameters. For instance, the number of days of gap after which pending transactions are to be expired, the number of bank accounts each investor can register for investment processing, the name of the directory in which video files and image files are to be stored, etc, are such configurable parameters. Changing the value of such a parameter must not force the application team to execute a fresh release of the application code.
Rigel provides a browser-based UI which can be used to inspect and change values of parameters. The data store Rigel uses has the capability to replicate within seconds across a set of servers, thus ensuring that if one server fails, the rest of the servers, and the application which query these parameters, remain unaffected.
Rigel pushes parameter change events to all applications which query the values in its data store. The 20th-century approach of restarting applications to force them to re-load configuration files is not needed.
RIgel is available under the Apache 2.0 licence. There is no Community Edition, Enterprise Edition, and other editions — what we offer on our Github repository is what we use in our projects.
Rigel client libraries are available for Java and Go. There are no plans to make additional language support available.
