How to push *.conf to universal forwarders?

[DUThibault]

I've got my Universal Forwarder doing indexing on some data sources for my Splunk instance. After spending some time directly editing the Universal Forwarder's /opt/splunkforwarder/etc/apps/_server_app_<class>/local/ directory (tweaking inputs.conf and creating props.conf and transforms.conf) only to have Splunk Web wipe the latter two files whenever I changed the data inputs on the Universal Forwarder, I figured out that I should edit those files on the Splunk instance, in its /opt/splunk/etc/deployment-apps/_server_app_<class>/local/ directory. Changes to inputs.conf (from Splunk Web) are sent to the Universal Forwarder without wiping props.conf and transforms.conf. Better.

But now, when I tweak props.conf and transforms.conf on the Splunk instance (without going through Splunk Web), the changes aren't copied across. Only inputs.conf gets synced. How do I get Splunk to push props.conf and transforms.conf to the Universal Forwarder?

[DUThibault · Accepted solution]

As somesoni2 indicated, the solution is to issue the command line splunk reload deploy-server on the main instance (the deployment server). There is apparently no such facility in the Splunk Web pages.

[somesoni2]

If you change the files directly on the file system on the Deployment Server (your Splunk Enterprise instance is acting as Deployment server), you'd need to run splunk reload deployment-server command for DS to pickup changes and make it available for your Splunk UF to download. See this for reload command information
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.0.2/Updating/Updateconfigurations#2._Reload_the_deplo...

[DUThibault]

I knew it had to be something like that. The question that comes up then is: Why isn't there a reload option in the Settings: (Distributed environment) Forwarder management page?