I have an actor setup where I have two consecutive routers. The first router is the parent of the second router. I wanted to move the configuration of these routers to the configuration file. Setting up the first router was not hard. The second one was a little tricker as the parent is different for each router.

This is an example of the actor paths:

/router1/$a/router2/$a
/router1/$a/router2/$b
/router1/$b/router2/$a
/router1/$b/router2/$b
etc.

I tried using a wildcard (*) in the configuration route, but got the following error:

com.typesafe.config.ConfigException$Parse: application.conf: 13: Reserved character '*' is not allowed outside quotes (if you intended '*' (Reserved character '*' is not allowed outside quotes) to be part of the value for 'deployment', try enclosing the value in double quotes)

After playing around a little it turns out you can use wildcards in the route, as long as it is enclosed with quotes. If I had taken the trouble to read the error message completely I would seen the hint 🙁 Anyway, problem solved. Here are the code snippets.

This is the appliction.conf:

akka {
	loglevel = "INFO"
	actor {
		provider = "akka.actor.LocalActorRefProvider"
		deployment {
			/controllerRouter {
	    		router = round-robin-pool
				resizer {
					lower-bound = 1
					upper-bound = 2
				}
			}
			"/controllerRouter/*/downloaderRouter" {
	    		router = round-robin-pool
				resizer {
					lower-bound = 1
					upper-bound = 4
				}
			} 
		}
	}
}

This is the code for the first router:

val controllerRouter = system.actorOf(FromConfig.props(Props[Controller]), "controllerRouter")

This is the code for the second router:

downloaderRouter = context.actorOf(FromConfig.props(Props(new Downloader(monitor))), "downloaderRouter")

I hope this saves someone time.