Add command for viewing/editing raft/peers.json?

[msabramo]

It occurred to me while writing an internal runbook for Consul that one thing I feel is important to check is the raft/peers.json file.

E.g.: I often end up doing:

cat /opt/consul/data/raft/peers.json

and if I were to find that this file contained null in it, then I would probably want to edit it and add back in my nodes.

Should there be some tooling around this, so it's not quite as manual?

[slackpad]

This is related to #1374.

[CpuID]

Big +1

[CpuID]

One thing to consider here - should manipulating the raft peers.json be a local operation? or a cluster wide operation? For example, removing a stale node, should such a remove command be executed on all relevant nodes individually?

[slackpad]

We've got the most common operation covered now where you can remove a stale peer without messing with peers.json at all. For recovery during an outage where there's no longer a leader, it'll require some more work to support that case, but the consul operator command provides a good framework to add more functionality in the future.