Re: Best practice for config files?

On 5/22/25 13:59, Michael F. Stemper via Python-list wrote:
> 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?
Eh, there are so many context-dependent practices that it's largely 
impossible to identify something to call a "best practice" these days. 
I'm going to make a couple of comments, but there's more to consider 
than just these thoughts.

There's a sort-of-standard package called platformdirs (a successor to 
appdirs) which tries to tell you where to put things in a 
platform-independent way.

https://pypi.org/project/platformdirs/
https://pypi.org/project/appdirs/

This works nicely if you're building something to distribute, and you 
want to have a system-neutral way to access a config file. For personal 
stuff, that may be overkill. If it's only for you, just do what works. 
Enhancement: have a default location for the config file hard-coded, but 
provide a cmdline option to give an alternative.