Configuration

There exist various way of providing a runtime configuration.

If you need to pass secrets, take a look at the Libsecret project. It allows one to securely store and retrieve secrets: just unlock the keyring and start your service.

Key file

GLib provide a very handy way of reading and parsing key files, which are widely used across freedesktop specifications.

It should be privileged if the configuration is mostly edited by humans.

[app]
public-dir=public

[database]
provider=mysql
connection=
auth=

using GLib;
using Valum;

var config = new KeyFile ();

config.parse_path ("app.conf");

var app = new Router ();

app.get ("/public/<path:path>",
         Static.serve_from_path (config.get_string ("app", "public-dir")));

JSON

The JSON-GLib project provide a really convenient JSON parser and generator.

{
    "app": {
        "publicDir": "public"
    },
    "database": {
        "provider": "mysql",
        "connection": "",
        "auth": ""
    }
}

using Json;
using Valum;

var parser = new Parser ();
parser.parse_from_file ("config.json");

var config = parser.get_root ();

var app = new Router ();

app.get ("/public/<path:path>",
         Static.serve_from_path (config.get_object ("app").get_string_member ("publicDir")));

YAML

There is a GLib wrapper around libyaml that makes it more convenient to use. YAML in itself can be seen as a human-readable JSON format.

app:
    publicDir: public
database:
    provider: mysql
    connection:
    auth:

using Valum;
using Yaml;

var config = new Document.from_path ("config.yml").root as Node.Mapping;

var app = new Router ();

app.get ("/public/<path:path>",
         Static.serve_from_path (config.get_mapping ("app").get_scalar ("publicDir").value));

Other approaches

The following approaches are a bit more complex to setup but can solve more specific use cases:

• GXml or libxml2
• GSettings for a remote (via DBus) and monitorable configuration
• environment variables via glib-2.0/GLib.Environment utilities
• CLI options (see VSGI.Server.add_main_option and VSGI.Server.handle_local_options)