conifer

Conifer

A multi-format, file-based configuration library for Node. It streamlines reading and parsing configurations from JSON or CSON files, with support for adding your own file-type handlers.

This project is simple right now, but there are some fun features planned for a future release.

Basic Usage

You can use Conifer with JavaScript or CoffeeScript:

var conifer = require('conifer');

conifer = require 'conifer'

In the examples below, it's assumed that you've required Conifer as above.

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conifer.parse

This function parses a config file asynchronously. It accepts two arguments – a file path and a callback function. The file path must be an unempty string and the callback should accept two arguments itself: the parsed config store, and an error object.

conifer.parse('example.json', function (store, err) {
    if (err !== null) {
        throw err;
    }
    // do something with `store`
});

In the callback, store will be either a conifer.Store instance on success or null. err will be null on success, or an Error object on failure.

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conifer.parseSync

This function parses a config file synchronously. It accepts a single argument – a file path. The file path must be an unempty string. This function returns a conifer.Store instance on success, and throws if parsing fails.

store = conifer.parseSync('example.json');

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conifer.Store

This is the class which is instantiated in parsing, and holds parsed configurations. The constructor for this class accepts a simple object of key/value pairs.

get method

The get method accepts a single argument, the name of the configuration to get, and returns the requested configuration (or undefined if it's not set).

var config = new conifer.Store({foo: 'bar'});
config.get('foo'); // bar

set method

The set method accepts a two arguments, the name of the configuration to set and the value to set it to.

var config = new conifer.Store({});
config.set('foo', 'bar');
config.get('foo'); // bar

Extending With File Handlers

Conifer can be extended to work with almost any configuration format. It's just a case of writing a file handler. The file handler API is extremely simple:

conifer.setFileHandler

This function adds a new file handler. It accepts two arguments – a file extension and a handler function. The handler function should accept a content string and return a successfully parsed object or throw an error.

conifer.setFileHandler('xml', function (fileContent) {
    try {
        return myMagicXmlLib.parse(fileContent);
    } catch (error) {
        throw error;
    }
});

With the above code, any call to conifer.parse or conifer.parseSync with a file path that has a .xml extension will use the specified handler function to parse the file content.

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conifer.getFileHandler

This function gets a file handler that's been set already. This function accepts a single argument – the file extension to get the handler for, and returns the requested function.

conifer.getFileHandler('json'); // [Function]

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conifer.removeFileHandler

This function removes a file handler that's been set already. This function accepts a single argument – the file extension to get the handler for.

conifer.removeFileHandler('json');
conifer.getFileHandler('json'); // undefined

Development

In order to develop Conifer, you'll need to install the following npm modules globally like so:

npm install -g coffee-script
npm install -g jake

And then install development dependencies locally with:

npm install

Once you have these dependencies, you will be able to run the following commands:

jake build: Build JavaScript from the CoffeeScript source.

jake lint: Run CoffeeLint on the CoffeeScript source.

jake test: Run all unit tests.

License

Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.