Bailiff - A configs manager

The bailiff is a single point of config management.

Bailiff lets you access all your configs. Be it .env, JSON files, and it also supports a central config in the mongo collection.

A central config can make it easy to share and manage common configs between your services, e.g. core DB configs.

Setup

Install

npm install --save bailiff

Add variables in the ‘.env’ file in the root dir of your service

You need this if you want to have central configs in Mongo DB.

BAILIFF_MONGO_USER="your-mongo-user"
BAILIFF_MONGO_PASS="your-mongo-pass"
BAILIFF_MONGO_HOST="your-mongo-host"
BAILIFF_MONGO_PORT="your-mongo-port"
BAILIFF_MONGO_DB="your-db-name"
BAILIFF_MONGO_COLLECTION="your-collection-name"

OR

BAILIFF_MONGO_URI="mongodb://user:pass@host:27017"
BAILIFF_MONGO_DB="your-db-name"
BAILIFF_MONGO_COLLECTION="your-collection-name"

How to use

Initialize central config of mongo

You can skip this part if you are not using central config.

Run bailiff-init before starting your node application.

We recommend you add this in the scripts section of your package.json.

eg: prestart: "bailiff-init" or prestart: "npx bailiff-init"

Get a config from .env or central config from mongo

Add bailiff in your code.

const bailiff = require("bailiff").default;

bailiff.get("MY_CONFIG_VAR"); 

To add custom configurations

const bailiff = require("bailiff").default;

OR

import bailiff from "bailiff"

// To add custom Hash config data or/and a JSON file. You can chain addStore.

bailiff.addStore({"MY_CONFIG_VAR": "MY_CONFIG_VALUE", "ANOTHER_CONFIG": "ANOTHER_VALUE"})
        .addStore("relative/path/to/your/json");

bailiff uses Singleton pattern. Add config store once and then use it later anywhere in the code in any file.

const bailiff = require("bailiff").default;

bailiff.get("ANOTHER_CONFIG");

To access central configs from Mongo DB

The data structure of the mongo document should look like this -

{
  "name": "MY_CONFIG_VAR",
  "value": "MY_CONFIG_VALUE",
  "status": 1
}

Make a unique index on name and status for fast search and accurate data.

You can access central config similar to other configs.

bailiff.get("MY_CONFIG_VAR");

Bailiff keeps a copy of the central mongo config.

It does not read from MongoDB every time.

It only reads from MongoDB once on the service startup. That makes it very fast.

Priority of configs

Priority of configs are

1. Custom added store
2. Dotenv file
3. Central config

This makes it easy to override central config if required.