Goals¶

getconf aims to solve a specific problem: provide a simple way to load settings in a platform-typical manner.

The problem¶

Daemons and centralized applications need to fetch some platform-specific configuration to run:

Beyond those required settings, an application needs to configure its behavior (timeouts, retries, languages, …).

Various solutions exist:

getconf has been designed to provide the following features:

Readability:

Development:

If I checkout the code and execute my program’s entry point, it should be able to start
If my local setup is slightly different from the default (non-standard DB port, …), I just have to put a simple local_settings.ini file in the current directory

Continuous integration:

The continuous integration server just needs to set a few well-defined environment variables to point the program to the test databases, servers, …

Production:

In a could-like setup, I can use facilities provided by my platform to set the appropriate environment variables
In a simpler, dedicated server setup, the application can also be configured with files in /etc

Customization:

While providing sane defaults via the ConfigGetter class, you can easily define and use your own logic by providing the finders you want to use in the order you want by using/subclassing BaseConfigGetter.

While designing getconf, we looked at other options:

Define everything in files

This makes it difficult to override a single setting (where should the file be?)
Not compatible with env-based cloud platforms
dev and prod often have very different configurations, but flat files don’t provide a simple switch to set those defaults

Define everything in the environment

Requires a prod-like setup for starting local servers, with files listing the environment variables

Load a single file, which includes others