Can I specify another location for splunk to look for apps?

[brent_weaver]

I am working on automation and I would like to know if there is a way to configure splunk ALSO look to an alt directory (besides /opt/splunk/etc/apps) for configs. Like with the deployment server (which cannot be used btw to deploy) I can sync with the empty dir deployment-apps, therefore not deleting the existing files.

Hopefully this makes sense why I would need to do this!

Thanks.

[acharlieh]

As @hortonew suggested, what type of automation are you doing here, and what sort of system are you on? I have used symbolic links on *nix before to bring apps into a running Splunk system. But this was also for keeping my development dir outside of the Splunk install directory, and that has "worked" in the past, but I cannot speak as to how supported it would be.

[hortonew]

Can you walk through your automation? Is this automation on the universal forwarder level or on a splunk enterprise server? At what point do you need an empty directory for apps?

[valiquet]

Don't write into system if you are in a distributed env. Better use apps. See bellow answer.