Welcome to Cfgtree Documentation

Contents:

Introduction

cfgtree provides an easy yet comprehensive way of describing, storing and parsing a user configuration for you Python application.

It requires the following acknolegdments:

  • Application settings actually represents a hierarchical structure, they can be organized into group of settings, subgroups, and they entierely depends on the application itself.

    This structure is called in Cfgtree a “bare configuration”, or “configuration tree”.

  • User settings may come from different inputs:

    • environment variables (12 factors approach). Example: MYAPP_VERBOSE=1.

    • command line argument. Example: --verbose

    • configuration storage such as file (JSON, YAML, INI) or even configuration server. Example:

      {
    "verbose": true
{

This allows you to define once your settings structure, and let the user of your application define the settings throught different ways. For instance, your application can read some settings through command line arguments, which is very useful for containerization of your application. It is indeed recommended by Heroku’s 12 Factor Good Practices.

Describing your configuration through a model also allows to have a configuration validator without having to maintain both a file schema (ex: JSON Schema) and the parsing logic code.

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