Confire

Confire is a simple but powerful configuration scheme that builds on the configuration parsers of Scapy, elasticsearch, Django and others. The basic scheme is to have a configuration search path that looks for YAML files in standard locations. The search path is hierarchical (meaning that system configurations are overloaded by user configurations, etc). These YAML files are then added to a default, class-based configuration management scheme that allows for easy development.

Features

• Configuration files in YAML
• Hierarchical configuration search
• Class based application defaults
• Settings pulled in from the environment

Setup

The easiest and usual way to install confire is to use pip:

pip install confire

To install the package from source, download the latests package tarball, unzip in a temporary directory and run the following command:

python setup.py install

As always, I highly recommend the use of a virtual environment to better manage the software dependencies for your particular code base.

Example Usage

Create a file called “myapp.yaml” and place it in one of the following places:

• /etc/myapp.yaml
• $HOME/.myapp.yaml
• conf/myapp.yaml

Create some configuration values inside the file like so:

## Set application environment
debug:   True
testing: False

## A simple database configuration
database:
    name: mydb
    host: localhost
    port: 5432
    user: postgres

In your code, create a file called “config.py” and add the following:

from confire import Configuration
from confire import environ_setting

class DatabaseConfiguration(Configuration):

    host = "localhost"
    port = 5432
    name = "mydb"
    user = "postgres"
    password = environ_setting("DATABASE_PASSWORD", required=False)

class MyAppConfiguration(Configuration):

    CONF_PATHS = [
        '/etc/myapp.yaml',
        os.path.expanduser('~/.myapp.yaml'),
        os.path.abspath('conf/myapp.yaml')
    ]

    debug    = False
    testing  = True
    database = DatabaseConfiguration()

settings = MyAppConfiguration.load()

Now, everywhere in your code that you would like to access these settings values, simply use as follows:

from config import settings

debug = settings.get('DEBUG') or settings['DEBUG']

Voila! A complete configuration system for your application!

Next Topics

Here are a list of topics for more detail about how to use confire in your Python applications.

• Configuring Apps with Confire
• Environment Variables
• Nested Configurations
• Class Documentation
• Changelog

About

There are many configuration packages available on PyPI - it seems that everyone has a different way of doing it. However, this is my prefered way, and I found that after I copy and pasted this code into more than 3 projects that it was time to add it as a dependency via PyPI. The configuration builds on what I’ve learned/done in configuring Scapy, elasticsearch, and Django - and builds on these principles:

1. Configuration should not be Python (sorry Django). It’s too easy to screw stuff up, and anyway, you don’t want to deal with importing a settings file from /etc!
2. Configuration should be on a per-system basis. This means that there should be an /etc/app.yaml configuration file as well as a $HOME/.app.yaml configuration file that overwrites the system defaults for a particular user. For development purposes there should also be a $(pwd)/app.yaml file so that you don’t have to sprinkle things throughout the system if not needed.
3. Developers should be able to have reasonable defaults already written in code if no YAML file has been provided. These defaults should be added in an API like way that is class based and modularized.
4. Accessing settings from the code should be easy.

So there you have it, with these things in mind I wrote confire and I hope you enjoy it!

Contributing

Confire is open source, and I would be happy to have you contribute! You can contribute in the following ways:

1. Create a pull request in Github: https://github.com/bbengfort/confire
2. Add issues or bugs on the bugtracker: https://github.com/bbengfort/confire/issues
3. Checkout the current dev board on waffle.io: https://waffle.io/bbengfort/confire

You can contact me on Twitter if needed: @bbengfort

Name Origin

French Chefs preparing Confit

con · fit
/kôNˈfē/
noun duck or other meat cooked slowly in its own fat.

Origin
[French] confire: to prepare
Also refers to the culinary art of pickling

I like cooking, and the thought of preparation in French culinary language appealed to me. The way I got here was to simply change the “g” in config to a “t”. A definition lookup and boom, a name!

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