hermansc/itkconfig

A simple config parser for go

ITKconfig - A small, powerful configuration parser for Golang

Originally started as an internal project at the Student society in Trondheim this package has now been open sourced, as we believe it is the simplest and best way to manage configuration files for Go-projects and we think others may agree with us as well.

Features and core-principles

• Makes writing Key-Value configuration files easy.
• Allows, in contrast to JSON, comments in your files - just prepend them with a #.
• If you want to use # in a value, or preserve leading and trailing spaces, wrap the value in double quotes: "#value"
• Use the same methods as when demarshalling JSON-files, just define your configuration struct with your wanted types and let ITKconfig take care of the rest.
• Source code is simple and about 100 lines, this makes it easy to understand the flow and also to make changes if you like.

Example configuration file

An example scenario is given where you want to provide a configuration file to your Web-application. It could look like:

# Port that the webservice is listening to
Port = 8000

# Folder where we find our templates
TemplatesFolder = templates

# Enable or disable debug mode, giving more output to the user.
Debug = true

Then, provided that this file is called myapp.config we can load it into our application by the following simple code:

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "github.com/itkinside/itkconfig"
  "log"
)

type Config struct {
  Port            int
  TemplatesFolder string
  Debug           bool
}

func main() {
  // Some sane defaults for our project.
  config := &Config{
    Port:            80,
    TemplatesFolder: "temps",
    Debug:           false,
  }

  // Override defaults with config-file.
  err := itkconfig.LoadConfig("myapp.config", config)
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }

  // Print our variables, just to show off.
  fmt.Printf("Port: %d\n", config.Port)
  fmt.Printf("Templates: %s\n", config.TemplatesFolder)
  fmt.Printf("Debug: %v\n", config.Debug)
}

Could it be more simple, and yet so powerful?