Confifu

Confifu was created by inspiration of application configuration in Ruby On Rails. It provides a simple way to configure your .Net application or module for different environments. It's convention based and also provides simple abstractions to create libraries and loosely coupled modules on top of it.

Install

Confifu is distributed as 2 nuget packages:

So they can be installed by:

Install-Package Confifu
Install-Package Confifu.Abstractions

Abstractions

Core Abstractions

Confifu.Abstractions contains main abstractions which are supposed to be a core of an application config

IAppConfig

public interface IAppConfig
{
    object this[string key] { get; set; }
}

The instance of IAppConfig is considered to be the only single place where configuration are stored to. So anytime at setup phase any module can set and read config properties.

IConfigVariables

public interface IConfigVariables
{
    string this[string key] { get; }
}

Very simple abstraction to provide access to key value configuration variables. By convention IAppConfig is supposed to have a single instance of IConfigVariables so all modules could use it and application at the top level can set any IConfigVariables it needs. It could be environment variables, app.config's appSettings section, json file, combination of them, any class that impleents IConfigVariables.

It's stored in the IAppConfig under ConfigVariables key. There are also extensions methods to help working with it:

appConfig.GetConfigVariables();
appConfig.SetConfigVariables(configVariables);

AppRunner

AppRunner is supposed to be an Action which "Run" the IAppConfig instance. By convention it's the only one place where configuration could expose to outer world (use static variables). It becomes usefull for integration of existing libraries to Confifu. For example integration of FluentScheduler to IAppConfig:

appConfig.AddAppRunnerAfter(() =>
{
    var actualRegistry = appConfig.GetFluentSchedulerRegistry();
    var serviceProvider = appConfig.GetServiceProvider();
    if (serviceProvider != null)
        JobManager.JobFactory = new ServiceProviderJobFactory(serviceProvider);

    JobManager.Initialize(actualRegistry);
});

Here we have configured schedulerRegistry through confifu, but to make it run we should call JobManager.Initialize. There are also some usefull extensions methods to work with AppRunner:

appConfig.GetAppRunner();
appConfig.SetAppRunner(runner);
appConfig.WrapAppRunner(currentRunner => () => {
// make some stuff before running already configured runner
currentRunner();
// make some stuff after running already configured runner
});
appConfig.AddAppRunnerAfter(runner);
appConfig.AddAppRunnerBefore(runner);

Build new abstraction

You can easy make your own abstractions on top of the Confifu.Abstractions which is supposed to be the central point of all configuration in your projects. Abstraction could be as simple as a convention like:

By key "DebugOutput" it supposed to be set Action<string> which will write given string to Debug Output. So it could be used by every library which depends on Confifu.Abstractions (if it's set by the top level app of course).

You should agree that it looks like classic Dependency Injection mechanism. But instead of focusing on ServiceInterface, ServiceImplementation, Lifetime - IAppConfig is more generic. So ServiceInterface is Key, ServiceImplementation and Lifetime is Object. The problem with DI Containers that there are tons of them in .net world. If you make a library which uses DI container inside and exposes some services, we have to make a bridge for our consumers so they can take control of creating services and injecting some services from outside. In last days Microsoft solves that problem by introducing their own abstraction layer for dependency injection https://github.com/aspnet/DependencyInjection . For libraries authors it's easier now what to use, they can just register their library services in IServiceCollection and use IServiceProvider for resolving services. On the top level of the app consumer can decide which DI container to use.

Microsoft's DependencyInjection abstractions are already integrated to Confifu https://github.com/Steinpilz/confifu-dependencyinjection :

appConfig.RegisterServices(serviceCollection => {
	serviceCollection.AddTransient<IMyService, MyService>();
});

Another useful and commonly used abstraction is logging: https://github.com/Steinpilz/confifu-logging

Setup App

Add new class inherited from Confifu.AppSetup which is going to setup your application: