CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonconfigconfiguration-files
cmeeren
cmeeren

Reputation: 4210

Pythonic way to set module-wide settings from external file

Some background (not mandatory, but might be nice to know): I am writing a Python command-line module which is a wrapper around latexdiff. It basically replaces all \cite{ref1, ref2, ...} commands in LaTeX files with written-out and properly formatted references before passing the files to latexdiff, so that latexdiff will properly mark changes to references in the text (otherwise, it treats the whole \cite{...} command as a single "word"). All the code is currently in a single file which can be run with python -m latexdiff-cite, and I have not yet decided how to package or distribute it. To make the script useful for anybody else, the citation formatting needs to be configurable. I have implemented an optional command-line argument -c CONFIGFILE to allow the user to point to their own JSON config file (a default file resides in the module folder and is loaded if the argument is not used).

Current implementation: My single-file command-line Python module currently parses command-line arguments in if __name__ == '__main__', and loads the config file (specified by the user in -c CONFIGFILE) here before running the main function of the program. The config variable is thus available in the entire module and all is well. However, I'm considering publishing to PyPI by following this guide which seems to require me to put the command-line parsing in a main() function, which means the config variable will not be available to the other functions unless passed down as arguments to where it's needed. This "passing down by arguments" method seems a little cluttered to me.

Question: Is there a more pythonic way to set some configuration globals in a module or otherwise accomplish what I'm trying to? (I don't want to rely on 3rd party modules.) Am I perhaps completely off the tracks in some fundamental way?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 834

Answers (1)

sirfz
sirfz

Reputation: 4277

One way to do it is to have the configurations defined in a class or a simple dict:

class Config(object):
    setting1 = "default_value"
    setting2 = "default_value"

    @staticmethod
    def load_config(json_file):
        """ load settings from config file """
        with open(json_file) as f:
            config = json.load(f)
        for k, v in config.iteritems():
            setattr(Config, k, v)

Then your application can access the settings via this class: Config.setting1 ...

Upvotes: 6

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