Suricata

I would add those to the documentation AND the config, any objections?

Not sure, maybe this needs to be looked at on a case by case basis. The default yaml is a monster, so adding more things to it is something that I would like to do carefully.

I didn't find a ticket for having multiple yamls (e.g. minimal/normal/everything, or split out yamls), but maybe its time to revisit this.

Another approach would be to make the current config much smaller, even remove all comments and just rely on the documentation where it's also easier to keep the defaults?

If not, adding the defaults to the current config shouldn't be too much.

Jason, do you know any nice way to deal with multiple yamls?

In general the question of what to have and haven't be part of the yaml shouldn't block already improving the userguide.

I think right now we could break it up into multiple files with include statements. It would make sense to keep commonly updated stuff in the suricata.yaml, and less commonly updated stuff in includes.

Assuming the includes are in some system directory, say /usr/share/suricata/config/app-layer.yaml, then tweaking stuff includes does become harder. You would have to make a complete copy of the top level object and modify it, as we don't have a way to override just one deeply nested configuration parameters in a file, but you can do it with the --set.

I've seen in some other projects (maybe docker-compose files? filebeat configuration maybe?) where they provide a dotted syntax to override nested settings.. For example we may have:

vars:
  address-groups:
    HOME_NET: "[192.168.0.0/16,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12]" 
    EXTERNAL_NET: "!$HOME_NET" 

vars.address-groups.HOME_NET: "7.1.0.0/16" 

It would be nice to define what we want to break out, and maybe go from there.

PostgreSQL has a rather large configuration file when all options are present. What they do is install a smaller file with some common option, then the rest get their default. Their documentation then covers all options, and while I'm not sure if this is maintained anymore, they also had an annotated exchaustive configuration file with defaults:

http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/Tidbits/annotated_conf_e.html

While it does increase overhead, we could make the sample suricata.yaml in the doc exhaustive, and perhaps trim down what we have in the installed one.