Inverting The Order Of Environmental Variables In Configs

September 2021

Playing with the idea of switching the heierarchy of environments and their variables in config files. For example, I'm doing this:

{
  "envars": {
    "database_host": {
      "dev": "freeside.cloud",
      "prod": "encom.cloud"
    },
    "database_name": {
      "dev": "gibson",
      "prod": "mcp"
    },
    "database_password": {
      "dev": "wintermute",
      "prod": "chess"
    },
    "database_username": {
      "dev": "william",
      "prod": "alan1"
    },
    "debug": {
      "dev": true,
      "prod": false
    },
    "log_level": {
      "dev": "INFO",
      "prod": "ERROR"
    }
  }
}

Instead of this:

{
  "envs": {
    "dev": {
      "database_host": "freeside.cloud",
      "database_name": "gibson",
      "database_password": "wintermute",
      "database_username": "william",
      "debug": true,
      "log_level": "INFO"
    },
    "prod": {
      "database_host": "encom.cloud",
      "database_name": "mcp",
      "database_password": "chess",
      "database_username": "alan1",
      "debug": false,
      "log_level": "ERROR"
    }
  }
}

It's an interesting experiment. It makes things more verbose though. First, there's a lot more lines in the config itself for the same info. Then, in the code, you can't simply do config_data = config['dev'] to get an environment loaded. Each call has to have the env defined in it. For example:

config = # Load the data
env = 'dev'

print(config.database_name[env])

instead of just being able to hit it with:

config = # Load the data for just 'dev'

print(config.database_name)

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