Everett v0.8 released!

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

What is it?

Everett is a Python configuration library.

Configuration with Everett:

  • is composeable and flexible

  • makes it easier to provide helpful error messages for users trying to configure your software

  • can pull configuration from a variety of specified sources (environment, ini files, dict, write-your-own)

  • supports parsing values (bool, int, lists of things, classes, write-your-own)

  • supports key namespaces

  • facilitates writing tests that change configuration values

  • supports component architectures with auto-documentation of configuration with a Sphinx autoconfig directive

  • works with whatever you're writing--command line tools, web sites, system daemons, etc

Everett is inspired by python-decouple and configman.

v0.8 released!

As I sat down to write this, I discovered I'd never written about Everett before. I wrote it initially as part of another project and then extracted it and did a first release in August 2016.

Since then, I've been tinkering with how it works in relation to how it's used and talking with peers to understand their thoughts on configuration.

At this stage, I like Everett and it's at a point where it's worth telling others about and probably due for a 1.0 release.

This is v0.8. In this release, I spent some time polishing the autoconfig Sphinx directive to make it more flexible to use in your project documentation. Instead of having configuration bits all over your project, you centralize it in one place and then in your Sphinx docs, you have something like:

.. autoconfig:: path.to.AppConfig

and it happily spits out the relevant configuration documentation. For example, here's Antenna's configuration documentation.

It'd be nice if configuration variables showed up in the index. I'll mull over that later.

Where to go for more

For more specifics on this release, see here: https://everett.readthedocs.io/en/latest/history.html#january-24th-2017

Documentation and quickstart here: https://everett.readthedocs.org/en/v0.8/

Source code and issue tracker here: https://github.com/willkg/everett

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.