Re: Best practice for config files?

On 22/05/2025 23:45, Mats Wichmann wrote:
> 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.
>
Mats is absolutely correct that there is no "one size fits all" solution.
However one solution that might or might not suit you (at least on 
WIndows; I hope it's applicable to Unix) is to look at sys.path and 
search for your configuration file in every directory it lists until you 
find it (or give an error message if it
isn't).  Alternatively look at the PATH envronment variable, which 
contains a list of directories separated by semicolons and which you can 
access as os.environ['PATH'] .
Best wishes,
Rob Cliffe
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