walter 0.3

A better configuration library for Django and other Python projects

Warning

Walter is pre-release software. Expect the API to change without notice, and expect this documentation to have lots of sharp edges.

Walter is a configuration library, inspired by python-decouple, and intended to replace direct access to os.environ in Django settings.py files (although it is by no means Django-specific). It currently supports Python 3.5+.

It differs from other, similar libraries for two reasons:

• It will let you specify your configuration parameters in one place and have auto-generated Sphinx documentation, just like with Python code. (Work on this hasn’t been started yet.)

• When your users try to start up your app with invalid configuration, the error message they get shows a list of all of the errors with every configuration parameter, not just the first one.

Installation

pip install walter

Usage

from walter.config import Config

# Your configuration needs to be wrapped in a context manager,
# so Walter can collect all the errors and display them at the end.
with Config("SGC", "Dialer") as config:

    # Read a configuration value with config.get()
    SECRET_KEY = config.get('SECRET_KEY')

    # Convert the returned value to something other than a string with cast.
    DEBUG = config.get('DEBUG', cast=bool)

    # You can pass any function that takes a string to `cast`.
    # Here, we're using a third party function to parse a database URL
    # string into a Django-compatible dictionary.
    DATABASES = {
        'default': config.get('DATABASE_URL', cast=dj_database_url.parse),
    }

    # You can also make a parameter optional by giving it a default.
    RAVEN_DSN = config.get('RAVEN_DSN', default=None)

    # Last but not least, help_text is displayed in your Sphinx docs.
    SITE_NAME = config.get('SITE_NAME',
                           help_text="Displayed to users in the admin")