Best practice for config files?
"Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> Thu, 22 May 2025 14:59:28 -0500
| Newsgroups | comp.lang.python |
|---|---|
| Organization | A noiseless patient Spider |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I recently wrote a program to do some record-keeping for me. I found myself hard-coding a bunch of different values into it. This didn't seem right, so I made my first use of configparser.ConfigParser(). Created the configuration file and everything is working fine. However, I wrote it based on the assumption that the program is running in the directory where the config file is stored, and has a specific name. I started having some second thoughts here. I thought about putting the location of the configuration file in the configuration file, but that seemed like a non-starter.[1] Should I specify the location of the config file with a command-line option, or is requiring the program to be executed in the directory containing the configuration file considered acceptable practice? [1] See Tegan Jovanka in _Castrovalva_ for more on this idea. -- Michael F. Stemper If it isn't running programs and it isn't fusing atoms, it's just bending space.