confucius - Configuration Management Library in Rust

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 "Wisdom in configuration" 

confucius is a Rust library that simplifies configuration file management for applications. Designed to be flexible and intuitive, it offers support for various formats and includes advanced features such as file inclusion and automatic configuration file discovery.

Features

• Automatic search for configuration files in standard paths
• Support for various configuration formats:
  • INI (implemented)
  • TOML (planned)
  • YAML (planned)
  • JSON (planned)
• Inclusion mechanism for importing multiple files or with glob patterns
• Format identification via shebang (#!config/FORMAT)
• Support for inline comments (# comment)
• Support for text values in double quotes

Search Paths

The library automatically searches for configuration files in the following paths (in order of priority), where appname is the name of the application:

1. /etc/appname/appname.conf
2. /etc/appname.conf
3. /opt/etc/appname.conf
4. /home/username/.config/appname/appname.conf
5. /home/username/.config/appname.conf
6. <executable_path>/appname.conf

Installation

Add this dependency to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
confucius = "0.1.0"

Usage Example

use confucius::{Config, ConfigValue};
use std::path::Path;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Create a configuration for an app called "myapp"
    let mut config = Config::new("myapp");
    
    // Load the configuration from default paths
    match config.load() {
        Ok(_) => println!("Configuration loaded successfully!"),
        Err(e) => {
            println!("Error loading configuration: {}", e);
            // Load from a specific path
            config.load_from_file(Path::new("/path/to/myapp.conf"))?;
        }
    }
    
    // Read values
    if let Some(server) = config.get("server", "hostname") {
        if let Some(hostname) = server.as_string() {
            println!("Server: {}", hostname);
        }
    }
    
    // Modify values
    config.set("app", "version", ConfigValue::String("1.1.0".to_string()));
    
    // Save the configuration
    config.save()?;
    
    Ok(())
}

Configuration File Format

INI Format Example

#!config/ini
# This is a comment

[app]
name = "My Application"
version = "1.0.0"
debug = true # Inline comment

[server]
hostname = "localhost"
port = 8080

# Include other configuration files
include=/etc/myapp/extra.conf
include=/etc/myapp/conf.d/*.conf

Include Mechanism

The library supports the inclusion of other configuration files through the include directive:

# Include a single file
include=/path/to/extra.conf

# Include all files with .conf extension in a directory
include=/path/to/conf.d/*.conf

Future Development

• Full implementation of TOML, YAML, and JSON formats
• Addition of schema validation features
• Support for overriding through environment variables
• Hot-reload functionality to reload configuration when it changes

License

This project is released under the MIT license.