configglue at a glance

What is configglue?

configglue is a library that glues together Python’s optparse.OptionParser and ConfigParser.ConfigParser, so that you don’t have to repeat yourself when you want to export the same options to a configuration file and a command-line interface.

The main features of configglue are:

• ini-style configuration files
• schema-based configuration
• command-line integration
• configuration validation

Why would I want to use configglue?

Some of the benefits of using configglue are that it allows you to:

• separate configuration declaration (which options are available) from definition (what value does each option take)
• validate configuration files (there are no required options missing, prevent typos in option names, assert each option value is of the correct type)
• use standard types out of the box (integer, string, bool, tuple, list, dict)
• use standards-compatible configuration files (standard ini-files)
• create your own custom types beyond what’s provided in the library
• easily support command-line integration
• override options locally by using several configuration files (useful for separating configuration files for different environments)

Got curious?

You can find a quickstart guide for configglue on Writing your first configglue-enabled application and you can get its code at http://launchpad.net/configglue.

As an additional bonus, there is another project called django-configglue which allows you to use all the benefits of configglue on your Django projects. You can find a quickstart guide for django-configglue on http://packages.python.org/django-configglue and you can get its code at http://launchpad.net/django-configglue.