So you have a package that can be configured with metaconfig and you want to start using it right now. How do you set where your named configs come from? The easiest way is to create a metaconfig file. This is a ConfigParser.ConfigParser. Metaconfig will search the following locations until it finds the file:
These options give you a lot of flexibility about where you define your master configuration. If you are developing in a sandbox you may use #2 or you can set your configuration per-user with #3. Use option #4 to set the configuration system-wide or per-virtualenv. You can always override the default with #1.
The metaconfig configuration must contain the section metaconfig. Within this the option configs is a whitespace-separated sequence of config names. For each config name the section <name>:<section> must be defined which corresponds to the section <section> of config <name>.
We can demonstrate this using the function metaconfig.init_from_string to initialise metaconfig without writing the config file.
>>> import metaconfig
>>> metaconfig.reset()
>>> metaconfig.init_from_string("""
... [metaconfig]
... configs = foo
...
... [foo:bar]
... a = 42
... b = baz
... """)
Somewhere else within your python code this configuration can be retrieved.
>>> config = metaconfig.get_config('foo')
>>> config.getint('bar', 'a')
42
>>> config.get('bar', 'b')
'baz'
Of course you can define as many configs and sections within metaconfig as you like.
>>> metaconfig.reset()
>>> metaconfig.init_from_string("""
... [metaconfig]
... configs = foo bar
...
... [foo:sec1]
... a = 42
...
... [foo:sec2]
... a = 101
...
... [bar:sec1]
... a = 999
... """)
>>> foo_config = metaconfig.get_config('foo')
>>> foo_config.getint('sec1', 'a')
42
>>> foo_config.getint('sec2', 'a')
101
>>> bar_config = metaconfig.get_config('bar')
>>> bar_config.getint('sec1', 'a')
999