nodejs-config

nodejs-config

A Laravel inspired simple NodeJs configuration loader and manager which can load configuration values based on the development environment.

##Installation##

The source is available for download from GitHub. Alternatively, you can install using Node Package Manager (npm):

npm install nodejs-config

##Setup##

All the configurations should be stored in your application within a folder named config. You may create multiple configuration files(json) and put group of configurations belongs to same category into a single file. For example you may keep applications general settings in config/app.json and database settings in config/database.json. See example configuration files at test folder.

You can setup a new configuration manager instance with following syntax:

var config = require('nodejs-config')(
   __dirname  // an absolute path to your applications `config` directory
);

During setup you may instruct the configuration manager how to determine which environment it is running in. The default environment for configuration manager is always production. However, you may pass an environments object to configuration manager during setup. The object passed to this method is used to determine the current environment. The Object should have following structure:

var config = require('nodejs-config')(
   __dirname,  // an absolute path to your applications 'config' directory
   {
      development: ['your-machine-name']
   }
);

You may add any number of environments and machine names to the object as needed. In this example, 'development' is the name of the environment and 'your-machine-name' is the hostname of your server. On Linux and Mac, you may determine your hostname using the hostname terminal command. If you need more flexible environment detection, you may pass a function to the configuration setup method, allowing you to implement environment detection however you wish:

var config = require('nodejs-config')(
   __dirname,  // an absolute path to your applications 'config' directory
   function()
   {
      return process.env.NODE_ENV;
   }
);

####Accessing A Configuration Value####

To access a configuration field timezoneOffset from the configuration file 'config/app.json' use following syntax:

config.get('app').timezoneOffset;

or alternatively you can get a nested configuration value out of the configuration group with dot style syntax as follows:

config.get('app.timezoneOffset');

You may also specify a default value to return if the configuration option does not exist:

config.get('app.timezoneOffset', 5.30);

####Setting A Configuration Value####

You may also set configuration values at run-time:

config.set('database.default', 'mongo');

Configuration values that are set at run-time are only set for life time of the configuration manager instance.

####Environment Specific Configuration####

It is often helpful to have different configuration values based on the environment the application is running in. For example, you may wish to use a different timezoneOffset on your local development machine than on the production server. It is easy to accomplish this using environment based configuration.

Simply create a folder within the config directory that matches your environment name, such as local. Next, create the configuration files you wish to override and specify the options for that environment. For example, to override the timezoneOffset for the local environment, you would create a app.json file in $path/config/local with the following content:

{
    "timezoneOffset": "6.30",
};

Notice that you do not have to specify every option that is in the base configuration file, but only the options you wish to override. The environment configuration files will "cascade" over the base files.

####Accessing The Current Configuration Environment####

You may access the current configuration environment via the environment method:

environment = config.environment();

You may also pass arguments to the environment method to check if the environment matches a given value:

if (config.environment('local'))
{
    // The environment is local
}
if (config.environment('local', 'staging'))
{
    // The environment is either local OR staging...
}