confy

Pragmatic & flexible configuration loader that makes your app settings clean and sexy.

You can find documentation here: https://confy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Supported platforms

• Python 2.6
• Python 2.7
• Python 3.2
• Python 3.3

Idea

Idea is simple and has been developed by (probably not only) django community, but has been never standardized. Here it is:

1. keep your configuration in separate python modules inside your settings/conf/config/<however-you-call-it> module like this:

   settings/
     |-- __init__.py     => init used for loading code
     |-- base.py         => this should be common stuff used in all environments
     |-- development.py  => change/add all you need to run the app in development
     |-- production.py   => change/add all you need to run the app in production
     `-- local.py        => everything that depends on your machine you currently
                            working on for your own (and everybody in a team)
                            safety - remove it from version control
   

2. load those files in the order you want to get the configuration. Use environment variables to decide which settings should be loaded. Assuming the variable is called ENV, here's the code that loads the configuration inside settings/__init__.py

   import os
   import confy
   
   confy = confy.loader(__file__)
   
   config = confy.merge(
       confy.from_modules('base', os.environ.get('ENV', 'development')),
       confy.from_modules('local', silent=True),
   )

3. so in the end of the day you can simply import it easily and everythink is setup for you

   >>> from settings import config
   >>> # DONE!
   >>>
   >>> config.DB_USER  # etc...

This is the basic stuff but "confy" has a lot more to offer.

Why

1. I believe in clean and elegant solutions.

2. *.ini and "configparser"-like parsers (eg from pylons/pyramid) are great but there are few issues with them:

   => Each setting has a type. And you have to write code that changes text into other types.
   
   => __getitem__ syntax is verbose, actually it's too verbose in some cases
   

   You don't have this problem when you keep your config/settings inside simple python files, however there is no standardized one-and-only-one-good-way how to keep and load those kind of files.

3. Recently I've found interesting presentation (https://speakerdeck.com/brutasse/stop-writing-settings-files) about configuration injected from environment variables. And I love the idea (untill slide No 12), but it has the same issues as *ini files

Configuration sources

With "confy" you can simply load the configuration from any source you want, from any place of your system. That gives you flexibility on how and where you want to keep configuration.

import os
import confy

confy = confy.loader(__file__)

config = confy.merge(

    # primarily read modules
    confy.from_modules('base', os.environ.get('ENV', 'development')),
    confy.from_modules('local', silent=True),  # no complains if no 'local.py'

    # if you'd like to setup things directly through your
    # environment variables, here's how you can do that
    confy.from_environ_vars([
        'DB_USER',
        'DB_PASS'
    ], silent=True),  # if environ vars are not set it's not a problem

    # if need additional data from ini files - no problem
    confy.from_ini('~/.project_sensitive_data.ini', silent=True),

    # additional configuration might be kept under given directory
    # in envdir-like manner (http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/envdir.html).
    # If settings/ directory contains "envvars" dir all the variables
    # will be loaded into a configuration
    confy.from_dirs('envvars', silent=True),
)

Configuration are loaded one after another, so please keep in mind that variables might override each other.

Installation

Simple and easy:

$ pip install confy

Authors

• Jakub Janoszek ([email protected])