Grouping configuration files in directories

In this recipe, you'll learn how to group configuration files in directories to greatly ease the management of configuration. We'll do this by configuring Nagios Core to load every file it can find ending with a .cfg extension in a given directory, which includes recursing through subdirectories. The end result will be that to have Nagios Core load a file, we only need to include it somewhere in this directory with an appropriate extension; we don't need to keep track of which files are being loaded and where, nor add any new definitions in nagios.cfg.

Getting ready

You will need to have a server running Nagios Core 4.0 or later and access to the command line to change its configuration. You should be familiar with the loading of individual configuration files using the cfg_file directive in /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg.

In particular, you should have a directory prepared that contains all of the configuration items you would like to be loaded...