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Simple Configuration Module

By Armin Ronacher filed in Application Structure

When it comes to structuring your application the question about a configuration comes up. The easiest way to use a configuration files is to import a configuration module.

For example you could have a file called websiteconfig.py that looks like this:

DEBUG = False
SECRET_KEY = 'mysecretkey'
DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:////tmp/myapp.db

Then you could use it in your application as follows:

import websiteconfig
app.debug = websiteconfig.DEBUG
app.secret_key = websiteconfig.SECRET_KEY

If you are using packages like outlined in the documentation you can put something like this into your __init__.py:

import websiteconfig as config

Then you can import the config like this in any module:

from yourapplication import config

This makes it very easy to later change the name of the config filename, to load different configuration modules based on environment or to switch the module to an INI file later.

This snippet by Armin Ronacher can be used freely for anything you like. Consider it public domain.

Comments

Use a local_config by Dan Jacob on 2010-05-03 @ 11:08
Another way is to always use the same name for your config module, but to have a "local_config" imported into the module:
```
# config.py

DATABASE_URI = "sqlite://"

try:
    from local_config import *
except ImportError:
    # no local config found
    pass
```
That way you can keep all your defaults the same, but provide overridden values as needed. The local_config module presumably would not be in your public repository.