Related Work¶
A huge amount of work, both in Python and beyond, has gone into the effective management of configuration information.
- Program defaults. Values pre-established by developers, often
as
ALL_UPPERCASE_IDENTIFIERS
or as keyword default to functions. - Configuration file format parsers/formatters. Huge amounts of the INI,
JSON, XML, and YAML specifications and toolchains, for example, are
configuration-related. There are many. anyconfig is perhaps of interest for its
flexibility. You could probably lump into this group binary data
marshaling schemes such as
pickle
. - Command-line argument parsers. These are all about taking configuration information from the command line. argh is one I particularly like for its simple, declarative nature. (aaargh is similar.)
- System and environment introspection. The best known of these would be
sys.argv
andos.environ
to get command line arguments and the values of operating system environment variables (especially when running on Unixy platforms). But any code that asks “Where am I running?” or “What is my IP address?” or otherwise inspects its current execution environment and configures itself accordingly is doing a form of configuration discovery. - Attribute-accessible dictionary objects. It is incredibly easy to create simple versions of this idea in Python–and rather tricky to create robust, full-featured versions. Caveat emptor. stuf and treedict are cream-of-the-crop implementations of this idea. I have not tried confetti or Yaco, but they look like interesting variations on the same theme.
- The portion of Web frameworks concerned with getting and setting cookies, URL query and hash attributes, form variables, and/or HTML5 local storage. Not that these are particularly secure, scalable, or robust sources…but they’re important configuration information nonetheless.
- While slightly afield, database interface modules are often used for querying configuration information from SQL or NoSQL databases.
- Some object metaprogramming systems. That’s a mouthful, right? Well some
modules implement metaclasses that change the basic behavior of objects.
value for example provides very
common-sense treatment of object instantiation with out all the Javaesque
self.x = x; self.y = y; self.z = z
repetition.options
similarly redesigns how parameters should be passed and object values stored. - Combomatics. Many configuration-related modules combine two or more of
these approaches. E.g. yconf
combines YAML config file parsing with
argparse
command line parsing. In the future,options
will also follow this path. There’s no need to take programmer time and attention for several different low-level configuration-related tasks. - Dependency injection frameworks are all about providing configuration information from outside code modules. They tend to be rather abstract and have a high “activation energy,” but the more complex and composed-of-many-different-components your system is, the more valuable the “DI pattern” becomes.
- Other things. conflib, uses dictionary updates to stack default, global, and local settings; it also provides a measure of validation.
This diversity, while occasionally frustrating, makes some sense. Configuration data, after all, is just “state,” and “managing state” is pretty much what all computing is about. Pretty much every program has to do it. That so many use so many different, home-grown ways is why there’s such a good opportunity.
Flask’s documentation is a real-world example of how “spread everywhere” this can be, with some data coming from the program, some from files, some from environment variables, some from Web-JSON, etc.