dotfig

dotfig

The dotfig library allows you to read user specified configuration from either the package.json or a dedicated .dotfilerc file. This gives users the freedom to keep simple configuration in the package.json, but when it grows to big for their liking, to move it to a dedicated dot file.

Installation

npm install --save dotfig

API

const dotfig = require('dotfig');

There are 2 different ways that you can use this module, basic or advanced.

Basic

const config = dotfig('example');

You supply the required function with a name. This name will be the property that we search for in package.json files and will be used as part of the filename for a dedicated config file. If you set name to foo your config filename will be .foorc, so we add a . and suffix with rc.

When we are looking for the config files and traversing the directories we will prefer dedicated dotfiles over package.json properties and the reason for that is simple, it takes a user more effort to create a custom file, and write their own JSON than it is to add a property to an existing package.json file. The more effort it requires from the user, the higher the priority.

Advanced

const config = dotfig({
  filename: 'config.json',
  name: 'property'
});

The clear difference between the basic mode is that we now assume you supply the function with an object that allows you to customize the loading/reading of the config file.

The following options can be specified;

• name required Name of the package.json property it should search for and return when it exists.
• filename By default we generate a filename based on the supplied name by prefixing it with a . and adding rc to the end of it, this property allows you to come up with a completely different filename. Alternatively, if you never want the rc file to be used, you can set this option to false.
• parse A custom parser to read the dedicated configuration file. By default we use the JSON parser, but you could switch things up write your own parser function so you can read toml or yaml contents for example.
• root The directory that we will start searching in. By default this will be the directory of the file that required the dotfig module and continue traversing the parent directory of it until we find a configuration file.
• packjson Name of the package.json file, defaults to package.json but you can also turn off searching for the package.json file by setting this value to false.

License

MIT