Generic application configuration implementation within Ruby.

Application Configuration

A few months ago I wrote a little bit about application configuration and how annoying all the snowflake configuration libraries built into applications makes actual usage. The main point being: configure your application via a Hash data structure. Doing this means the ability to provide configuration via JSON, YAML, XML or anything else that can result in a Hash. It also means sanity when configuring applications, especially when deployed.

So, after talking about not implementing snowflake configuration libraries I decided to practice what I was preaching and write a reusable library so I would stop recreating JSON compatible configuration support.

bogo-config

The bogo-config library is a simple extension of providing application configuration via Hash type. At its core, it simply reads a Hash from a file, be it JSON, YAML, XML, or Ruby. It adds some extra sugar in as well if you want to enforce some rules. Default usage is pretty simple:

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require 'bogo-config'

config = Bogo::Config.new('/path/to/file.json')
p config.data

But we can also subclass and define configuration items:

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require 'bogo-config'

class MyConfig < Bogo::Config
  attribute :name, String, :default => 'unset'
  attribute :age, Integer, :coerce => lambd{|v| v.to_i}
end

This allows us to apply some rules to the configuration, and gives us easy to use methods to access that data:

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config = MyConfig.new('/path/to/config.json')
p config.name
p config.age
p config.data

and data will hold all values included those not explicitly defined via attribute entries. Easy!

• https://github.com/spox/bogo-config