prefer

What is it?

Prefer is a node library for helping you manage application configurations.

It provides a set of interfaces which provide standard methods for reading arbitrary project configuration data. This can vary from simple cases like JSON, to more complicated examples - such as retreiving configuration data from a database.

How do I use it?

Firstly, you'll want to install the module. This can be done easily with npm.

npm install prefer

Prefer is fairly simple to use. A basic use case might be that you have the following JSON configuration in settings.json:

{
  "auth": {
    "username": "user",
    "password": "pass"
  }
}

You can load these settings with the following code using promises:

function configure (value) {
    // value will be set to "user" at this point.
}
 
require('prefer').load('settings')
    .then(function (configurator) {
        configurator.get('auth.username').then(configure);
    });

If you prefer to use callbacks, you can also use them as you wish throughout the prefer APIs:

// Get a Configurator object which we can use to retrieve settings.
require('prefer').load('settings', function (err, configurator) {
    if (err !== null) { throw err; }
 
    configurator.get('auth.username', function (err, value) {
        // value will be set to "user" at this point.
    });
});

You will notice that prefer only required 'settings' as the filename. It should always be given without a path or extension, because prefer takes care of looking through the filesystem for configuration files. On both Unix and Windows systems, it will look in all of the standard folders, as well as some conventional places where people like to put their configurations.

Ordering matters, so having a file in ./settings.json as well as another in /etc/settings.json is still reliable. The configuration in ./settings.json will be used first. Prefer doesn't care what format your user writes your settings in, so they can also use settings.yaml, settings.xml, settings.cson, or any other supported format.

If you prefer to look in specific places, you can always pass an options object as the second argument to prefer.load, and provide it the files.searchPaths setting as an array of locations for prefer to look in. Here's an example:

var prefer = require('prefer'),
    options = {
        files: {
            searchPaths: ['./etc', '.']
        }
    };

// Get a Configurator object which we can use to retrieve settings.
prefer.load('settings', options, someFunction);

Supported configuration formats

Along with being fully configurable to support any arbitrary data source you'd like, the following types of data can immediately be used as configuration formats upon installation of prefer:

• CoffeeScript
• INI
• JSON (using json5)
• CSON
• XML
• YAML

Why asyncronous?

A lot of configuration tools prefer to provide a blocking method of retrieving a project's configuration, in order to supply a more-simple method of getting the configuration. One goal of prefer is to make sure that we aren't limited to specific use-cases - and some projects require real-time, dynamic updating of their configuration. Prefer provides all of it's interfaces in an asyncronous manner in order to provide that possibility without the requirement that those actions are blocking.