aconf

🤖 Auto Config

Memory-based global configuration for Python projects -- in 10 lines of code (including empty lines). Made with the intention of ridding the need to pass Config objects everywhere. Option to use namedtupled if wanted.

Installing

pip install aconf

Why?

Honestly? Because why not. Was tired of having to pass Config objects left and right in small personal projects, so created this.

Using

This module comes with three main functions:

• make_config(**kwargs): Creates the configuration in memory.
• config(): Loads configuration from memory as standard dictionary.
• conf(): Loads configuration from memory as namedtuple object for cleaner access.

from aconf import make_config, config, conf

# Creates a global configuration that can be accessed by any other portion of the runtime.
make_config(database={"user": "admin", "password": "db_password", "host": "localhost", "port": "3306"}, method="GET")

# Accessing the global configuration as a dictionary.
print(config()['database']['user'])
# >>> admin

# Accessing the global configuration as a namedtuple object.
print(conf().database.user)
# >>> admin

A single file example doesn't encapsulate the usefulness of this module. Instead, imagine the following project:

.
├── project
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── config.py
│   └── functionality.py
└── main.py

config.py

""" 'Config' class to hold our desired configuration parameters. 

Note:
    This is technically not needed. We do this so that the user knows what he/she should pass 
    as a config for the specific project. Note how we also take in a function object - this is
    to demonstrate that one can have absolutely any type in the global config and is not subjected
    to any limitations.
"""

from aconf import make_config

class Config:
    def __init__(self, arg, func):
        make_config(arg=arg, func=func)

functionality.py

""" Use of the global configuration through the `conf` function. """

from aconf import conf

class Example:
    def __init__(self):
        func = conf().func
        arg = conf().arg

        self.arg = func(arg)

main.py

from project.config import Config
from project.functionality import Example

# Random function to demonstrate we can pass _anything_ to 'make_config' inside 'Config'.
def uppercase(words):
    return words.upper()

# We create our custom configuration without saving it.
Config(arg="hello world", func=uppercase)

# We initialize our Example object without passing the 'Config' object to it.
example = Example()
print(example.arg) 
# >>> "HELLO WORLD"

Performance

Absolutely no idea. I wrote this for small projects that I don't intend on releasing and so I have not bothered to benchmark it. If anyone runs the number it would be lovely if you reported either as an Issue, or directly by shooting a pull request with this portion of the README.md updated. The project in essence does the following:

• make_config(**kwargs): Pickles the kwargs dictionary and saves it to memory.
• config(): Loads the pickled dictionary from memory.
• conf(): Loads the pickled dictionary from memory and transforms it into namedtuple.

It would be reasonable to assume conf() performance is slower than config(). If I had to assume the largest performance drop is within the dumping and loading of pickled objects (even if from memory).

Project

This is the entirety of the project, which is inside __init__.py. Uses namedtuple:

import namedtupled

def make_config(**kwargs):
    globals()["aconf"] = kwargs

conf = lambda: namedtupled.map(globals()["aconf"])
config = lambda: globals()["aconf"]