Everett v0.9 released and why you should use Everett

, 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 It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with.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

  • supports auto-documentation of configuration with a Sphinx autocomponent directive

  • supports easy testing with configuration override

  • 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

  • supports component architectures

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

Everett is inspired by python-decouple and configman.

v0.9 released!

This release focused on overhauling the Sphinx extension. It now:

  • has an Everett domain

  • supports roles

  • indexes Everett components and options

  • looks a lot better

This was the last big thing I wanted to do before doing a 1.0 release. I consider Everett 0.9 to be a solid beta. Next release will be a 1.0.

Why you should take a look at Everett

At Mozilla, I'm using Everett 0.9 for Antenna which is running in our -stage environment and will go to -prod very soon. Antenna is the edge of the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla Firefox.

When writing Antenna, I started out with python-decouple, but I didn't like the way python-decouple dealt with configuration errors (it's pretty hands-off) and I really wanted to automatically generate documentation from my configuration code. Why write the same stuff twice especially where it's a critical part of setting Antenna up and the part everyone will trip over first?

Here's the configuration documentation for Antenna:

http://antenna.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html#application

Here's the index which makes it easy to find things by component or by option (in this case, environment variables):

http://antenna.readthedocs.io/en/latest/genindex.html

When you configure Antenna incorrectly, it spits out an error message like this:

1  <traceback omitted, but it'd be here>
2  everett.InvalidValueError: ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'foo'
3  namespace=None key=statsd_port requires a value parseable by int
4  Port for the statsd server
5  For configuration help, see https://antenna.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html

So what's here?:

  • Block 1 is the traceback so you can trace the code if you need to.

  • Line 2 is the exception type and message

  • Line 3 tells you the namespace, key, and parser used

  • Line 4 is the documentation for that specific configuration option

  • Line 5 is the "see also" documentation for the component with that configuration option

Is it beautiful? No. [1] But it gives you enough information to know what the problem is and where to go for more information.

Further, in Python 3, Everett will always raise a subclass of ConfigurationError so if you don't like the output, you can tailor it to your project's needs. [2]

First-class docs. First-class configuration error help. First-class testing. This is why I created Everett.

If this sounds useful to you, take it for a spin. It's almost a drop-in replacement for python-decouple [3] and os.environ.get('CONFIGVAR', 'default_value') style of configuration.

Enjoy!

Where to go for more

For more specifics on this release, see here: http://everett.readthedocs.io/en/latest/history.html#april-7th-2017

Documentation and quickstart here: https://everett.readthedocs.org/en/v0.9/

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.