Is there any way to validate the shiny-server.conf as used in shiny server pro for syntactical errors? I would rather want to find out BEFORE the server fails to restart.
Such a check can be easily added to an automatic deployment script... e.g. a new shiny-server.conf will be only automatically deployed (+ server restart) when it is deemed syntactically correct.
This is a fantastic question. I do not believe that there is any such approach (although that would be great).
The best thing I can think of now is having an IT sandbox used purely for checking the configuration before pushing to the prod box (i.e. having another shiny server to test the config file changes on).
This is, of course, much less than ideal. Our general recommendation is to stop and then start the server to pick up the config.
Yeah... a real staging system would be the correct approach and solves a lot of other issues as well. At the moment its a number too big though. I was hoping though the conf script follows some common syntax. In worst case I could probably just write a minimal parser to check for a few deviations at least.