nconf

A hybrid local / remote configuration storage library for node.js.

Installation

Installing npm (node package manager)

  curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Installing nconf

  [sudo] npm install nconf

Usage

Using nconf is easy; it is designed to be a simple key-value store with support for both local and remote storage. Keys are namespaced and delimited by :. Lets dive right into sample usage:

  var fs    = require('fs'),
      nconf = require('nconf');
  
  //
  // Setup nconf to user the 'file' store and set a couple of values;
  //
  nconf.use('file', { file: 'path/to/your/config.json' });
  nconf.set('database:host', '127.0.0.1');
  nconf.set('database:port', 5984);
  
  //
  // Get the entire database object from nconf
  //
  var database = nconf.get('database');
  
  //
  // Save the configuration object to disk
  //
  nconf.save(function (err) {
    fs.readFile('path/to/your/config.json', function (err, data) {
      console.dir(JSON.parse(data.toString()))
    });
  });

Storage Engines

Memory

A simple in-memory storage engine that stores a nested JSON representation of the configuration. To use this engine, just call .use() with the appropriate arguments. All calls to .get(), .set(), .clear(), .reset() methods are synchronous since we are only dealing with an in-memory object.

  nconf.use('memory');

File

Based on the Memory engine, but provides additional methods .save() and .load() which allow you to read your configuration to and from file. As with the Memory store, all method calls are synchronous with the exception of .save() and .load() which take callback functions. It is important to note that setting keys in the File engine will not be persisted to disk until a call to .save() is made.

  nconf.use('file', { file: 'path/to/your/config.json' });

The file store is also extensible for multiple file formats, defaulting to JSON. To use a custom format, simply pass a format object to the .use() method. This object must have .parse() and .stringify() methods just like the native JSON object.

Redis

The Redis engine will persist all of your configuration settings to a Redis server. All calls to .get(), .set(), .clear(), .reset() are asynchronous taking an additional callback parameter.

  nconf.use('redis', { host: 'localhost', port: 6379, ttl: 60 * 60 * 1000 });

The Redis engine also has an in-memory cache with a default TTL of one hour. To change this, just pass the ttl option to .use().

More Documentation

There is more documentation available through docco. I haven't gotten around to making a gh-pages branch so in the meantime if you clone the repository you can view the docs:

  open docs/nconf.html

Run Tests

Tests are written in vows and give complete coverage of all APIs and storage engines.

  vows test/*-test.js --spec

Author: Charlie Robbins