Introduction

bicop is a python library to process ISC bind-style configuration files. These are nested structures that look like this:

datasource1 {
    server     "server1.your.domain";
    username   "client";
    password   "secret";
    extra {
        isolation "full";
    };
};

tables {
    "users";
    "groups";
};

Parsing

Parsing is trivial using the ‘’parse’’ method:

from bicop import parse
parse("/etc/bind/named.conf")

This returns a standard python dictionary with all data read from the file. Entries in the dictionary can be other dictionaries or lists.

Merging

A common need is to be able to support default values for configurations or to handle configuration at multiple levels with priorities, for example a uer configuration overriding entries from the system-wide configuration. To support this bicop has a utility method that can merge dictionaries. You can use it like this:

from bicop import parse
from bicop import merge

configuration=parse("/etc/application.conf")
userconfig=parse("/home/user/.application")
merge(configuration, userconfig, overwrite=True)

Easy access for nested dictionaries

Configuration files in this format can have deeply nested structures. Accessing those using standard python dictionaries is a slightly cumbersone. To make this a bit more pleasant on the eyes you can use the NestedDict wrapper:

from bicop import parse
from bicop import NestedDict

configuration=NestedDict(parse("/etc/application.conf"))
print "Your signature is: %s" % configuration["profiles/user/signature"]

Changes