config

What is config?

The config npm package is designed to simplify the management of configuration settings for Node.js applications. It allows developers to organize configuration variables for different deployment environments, such as development, testing, and production, in a structured and accessible manner. This package supports configuration file formats like JSON, YAML, and JavaScript, enabling easy integration into various projects.

What are config's main functionalities?

Environment-Specific Configurations

This feature allows you to load different configurations based on the current environment (e.g., development, production). The code sample demonstrates how to access a database configuration specific to the current environment.

const config = require('config');
let dbConfig = config.get('Customer.dbConfig');
console.log(dbConfig.host);

Custom Environment Variables

Leverage custom environment variables within your configuration files. The example shows how to access a nested configuration property, such as a database password.

const config = require('config');
let dbPassword = config.get('Customer.dbConfig.password');
console.log(dbPassword);

Configuration File Formats

Supports multiple configuration file formats including JSON, YAML, and JavaScript. This example demonstrates accessing a server port setting from a JSON configuration file.

// Assuming you have a JSON config file named 'default.json' in your config directory
const config = require('config');
let serverPort = config.get('server.port');
console.log(serverPort);

Other packages similar to config

dotenv

Dotenv is a module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. While dotenv is focused on loading environment variables, config deals with organizing and accessing hierarchical configurations.

nconf

nconf is a hierarchical node.js configuration with files, environment variables, command-line arguments, and atomic object merging. It provides a similar functionality to config but with a different approach to organizing and prioritizing configuration sources.

README

node-config

Configuration control for production node deployments

Introduction

Node-config is a configuration system for Node.js application server deployments. It lets you define a default set of application parameters, and tune them for different runtime environments (development, qa, staging, production, etc.).

Parameters defined by node-config can be monitored and tuned at runtime without bouncing your production servers.

Online documentation is available at http://lorenwest.github.com/node-config/latest

Quick Start

In your project directory, install and verify using npm:

my-project$ npm install config
my-project$ npm test config

Edit the default configuration file (.js, .json, or .yaml):

my-project$ mkdir config 
my-project$ vi config/default.yaml

(example default.yaml file):

Customer:
  dbHost: localhost
  dbPort: 5984
  dbName: customers

Edit the production configuration file:

my-project$ vi config/production.yaml

(example production.yaml file):

Customer:
  dbHost: prod-db-server

Use the configuration in your code:

var CONFIG = require('config').Customer;
...
db.connect(CONFIG.dbHost, CONFIG.dbPort, CONFIG.dbName);

Start your application server:

my-project$ export NODE_ENV=production
my-project$ node app.js

Running in this configuration, CONFIG.dbPort and CONFIG.dbName will come from the default.yaml file, and CONFIG.dbHost will come from the production.yaml file.

See Also

node-config - Online documentation
node-monitor - Monitor your running node applications

License

Released under the Apache License 2.0

See LICENSE file.

Copyright (c) 2011 Loren West