"""
The basic idea is that config information can be pulled out of
* Global config file
* User local config file
* environment variables
* command line
Higher priority comes later in the list.
"""
But here's an implementation of cascading config file/command line options with ConfigParser and OptionParser - without subclassing.
Basically you just...
- Set global defaults in at the top of the module in the constants section
- Use those to set defaults in the config object
- Read in the config file possibly over-riding defaults
- Read out the values in the config object to a dictionary
- Use THOSE values to set the command line defaults
Then you can get any option you need out of the command line options argument
It's not very flexible, but it uses standard libraries and should be fairly obvious.
#! /usr/bin/env python __doc__ = """ example of cascading options with ConfigParser and OptionParser """ # imports import sys from ConfigParser import ConfigParser from optparse import OptionParser # constants default_option = 'default_value' default_toggle = True # classes # internal functions def main(): # create a config parser # config parser objects store all options as strings config = ConfigParser({'option':str(default_option), 'toggle':str(default_toggle), }) config.read('example.cfg') # create command line option parser parser = OptionParser("%prog [options]" + __doc__.rstrip()) # configure command line options parser.add_option("-o", "--option", action="store", dest="option", help="set option") parser.add_option("-t", "--toggleOff", action="store_false", dest="toggle", help="set toggle off") parser.add_option("-T", "--toggleOn", action="store_true", dest="toggle", help="set toggle on") # read config objects defaults section into a dictionary config_options = config.defaults() # config_options is dictionary of strings, over-ride toggle to bool config_options['toggle'] = config.getboolean('DEFAULT', 'toggle') # feed dictionary of defaults into parser object parser.set_defaults(**config_options) # parse command line options (options, args) = parser.parse_args() print "option: %s" % options.option if options.toggle: print "toggle is ON" else: print "toggle is OFF" return 0; if __name__ == '__main__': status = main() sys.exit(status)