Configster

Configster is a tidy little configuration management utility for your application.

You probably haven't heard of it.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'configster'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install configster

Usage

For most applications, you'll want to load Configster before you start loading the rest of your application. For example:

require 'configster'
Configster.load!(File.join('path', 'to', 'my_config.yml'))

You can also pass a raw hash of stuff into load! as long as it's in the format of "ClassName" => { 'variable' => 'whatever' }

Configster.load!('MyAwesomeClass' => { :something => 'cool' })

Or load an entire directory:

Configster.load!(File.join(Rails.root, 'config', 'configster'))

Then, just include Configster in any classes you want:

class KonfiguredKlass
  include Configster
end

Your class now has access to a configster and raw_configster function where you can query bits and pieces of your configuration.

Example

Say you're writing a sweet application that uses HTTParty to fetch data from Twitter. You want to share this application with the world, but you don't want to hard code your credentials. Here's how you might handle that:

First, make yourself a nice little configuration file and save it to ~/my_sweet_app_credentials.yml:

MySweetApp:
  username: SweetUsername
  password: SweetPassword123

Then, you'll write your application like this:

require 'configster'
Configster.load!(File.expand_path('~/my_sweet_app_credentials.yml'))

class MySweetApp

  include Configster
  include HTTParty
  
  def initialize
    @auth = {
      :username => configster.username,
      :password => configster.password
    }
  end
  
  def timeline(which = :friends, options = { })
    options.merge!(:basic_auth => @auth)
    self.class.get("/statuses/#{which}_timeline.json", options)
  end
  
end

You can also access the configuration more directly without the mixin by doing the following:

# Return the config as an instance of OpenStruct
Configster.config_for('MySweetApp')

# Return the config as a raw hash
Configster.raw_config_for('MySweetApp')

Now you can share your application without hard coding and/or sharing your credentials.

For more examples accessing Configster directly or using it without YAML, check the examples directory in the gem.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Write specs for your changes to make sure I don't break your features in the future.
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create new Pull Request