The most common use case is when people want to configure replication and sharding. Currently they have to use index templates for that.

One quick and easy-to-implement solution would be to add a configuration option:

hibernate.search.backend.myBackend.index_defaults.schema_management.settings_file = my-settings.json

Later, we can introduce more powerful solutions such as HSEARCH-3306 Open .

Questions:

1. How should we interpret the file path: relative to the classpath root? Relative to the working directory? As an URL?
2. Should we take the settings into account when validating the schema?