Can I Split A Large HAProxy Config File Into Multiple Smaller Files?

Answer :

Configuration files can't be linked together from a configuration directive.

However HAProxy can load multiple configuration files from its command line, using the -f switch multiple times:

haproxy -f conf/http-defaults -f conf/http-listeners -f conf/tcp-defaults -f conf/tcp-listeners  

If you want to be flexible with the amount of config files you can even specify a directory like this: -f /etc/haproxy. The files will then be used in their lexical order, newer files overriding older files. See the mailing list for an example, if provides links to the documentation. This information can be found in the management guide, not the regular docs.

Stumbled on this answer where the author created scripts to imitate nginx disable enable sites functionality. In the haproxy init.d startup he uses script loop to build the haproxy -f commands concatenation.

/etc/init.d/haproxy:

EXTRAOPTS=`for FILE in \`find /etc/haproxy/sites-enabled -type l | sort -n\`; do CONFIGS="$CONFIGS -f $FILE"; done; echo $CONFIGS` 

haensite script:

#!/bin/bash  if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then   echo "You must be a root user" 2>&1   exit 1 fi  if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then   echo "Invalid number of arguments"   exit 1 fi  echo "Enabling $1..."  cd /etc/haproxy/sites-enabled ln -s ../sites-available/$1 ./  echo "To activate the new configuration, you need to run:" echo "  /etc/init.d/haproxy restart" 

hadissite script:

#!/bin/bash  if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then   echo "You must be a root user" 2>&1   exit 1 fi  if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then   echo "Invalid number of arguments"   exit 1 fi  echo "Disabling $1..."  rm -f /etc/haproxy/sites-enabled/$1  echo "To activate the new configuration, you need to run:" echo "  /etc/init.d/haproxy restart" 

This was a solution building off of @stephenmurdoch's answer which involved the use of multiple -f <conf file> arguments to the haproxy executable.

Using the stock CentOS 6.x RPM's included /etc/init.d/haproxy script you can amend it like so:

start() {     $exec -c -q -f $cfgfile $OPTIONS     if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then         echo "Errors in configuration file, check with $prog check."         return 1     fi      echo -n $"Starting $prog: "     # start it up here, usually something like "daemon $exec"     #daemon $exec -D -f $cfgfile -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy_ds.cfg -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy_es.cfg -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy_stats.cfg -p $pidfile $OPTIONS     daemon $exec -D -f $cfgfile $(for i in /etc/haproxy/haproxy_*.cfg;do echo -n "-f $i ";done) -p $pidfile $OPTIONS     retval=$?     echo     [ $retval -eq 0 ] && touch $lockfile     return $retval } 

With the above in place you can then create files such as haproxy_<X>.cfg and haproxy_<Y>.cfg using whatever names you want. The above for loop will include these files in an augmented daemon haproxy ... line if these files are present, otherwise the stock haproxy.cfg file will be used solely.

Within the haproxy_<...>.cfg files you need to make sure that your global and defaults are defined in the "toplevel" haproxy.cfg file. The rest of the files simply need to have frontend/backends and nothing more.