📚 config - Awesome Go Library for Configuration

Go Gopher mascot for config

Cloud native application configuration. Bind ENV to structs in only two lines.

🏷️ Configuration
📂 Libraries for configuration parsing.
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Detailed Description of config

Config

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Manage your application config as a typesafe struct in as little as two function calls.

type MyConfig struct {
	DatabaseUrl string `config:"DATABASE_URL"`
	FeatureFlag bool   `config:"FEATURE_FLAG"`
	Port        int // tags are optional. PORT is assumed
	...
}

var c MyConfig
err := config.FromEnv().To(&c)

How It Works

It's just simple, pure stdlib.

  • A field's type determines what strconv function is called.

  • All string conversion rules are as defined in the strconv package

  • time.Duration follows the same parsing rules as time.ParseDuration

  • *net.URL follows the same parsing rules as url.Parse

    • NOTE: *net.URL fields on the struct must be a pointer
  • If chaining multiple data sources, data sets are merged. Later values override previous values.

    config.From("dev.config").FromEnv().To(&c)
    
  • Unset values remain intact or as their native zero value

  • Nested structs/subconfigs are delimited with double underscore

    • e.g. PARENT__CHILD
  • Env vars map to struct fields case insensitively

    • NOTE: Also true when using struct tags.
  • Any errors encountered are aggregated into a single error value

    • the entirety of the struct is always attempted
    • failed conversions (i.e. converting "x" to an int) and file i/o are the only sources of errors
      • missing values are not errors

Why you should use this

  • It's the cloud-native way to manage config. See 12 Factor Apps
  • Simple:
    • only 2 lines to configure.
  • Composeable:
    • Merge local files and environment variables for effortless local development.
  • small:
    • only stdlib
    • < 180 LoC

Design Philosophy

Opinionated and narrow in scope. This library is only meant to do config binding. Feel free to use it on its own, or alongside other libraries.

  • Only structs at the entry point. This keeps the API surface small.

  • Slices are space delimited. This matches how environment variables and commandline args are handled by the go cmd.

  • No slices of structs. The extra complexity isn't warranted for such a niche usecase.

  • No maps. The only feature of maps not handled by structs for this usecase is dynamic keys.

  • No pointer members. If you really need one, just take the address of parts of your struct.

    • One exception is *url.URL, which is explicitly a pointer for ease of use, matching the url package conventions