confide

Confide is a simple configuration module for node.js. It will merge an environment-specific configuration file with a default configuration file and return the merged values.

Assume the directory structure:

|- config
|  |- default.json
|  |- production.json
|- node_modules
|  |- confide
|- myscript.js

Any property declared in a default config file may be overridden by an environment-specific config file.

// in default.json
{
  "showLogMsgs": true // will be overridden below
  "dateFormat": "MM/DD/YYYY" // will not be overridden below
}

// in production.json
{
  "showLogMsgs": false
  // inherit dateFormat
}

In myscript.js, we can read our configuration by invoking confide's load() method:

var path = require('path'),
  CONFIG_DIR = path.join(__dirname, 'config'),
  confide = require('confide');

confide({configDir: CONFIG_DIR}).load('production', function (err, mergedConfig) {
  mergedConfig.showLogMsgs; // false
});

The confide function takes a number of parameters:

• configDir (required) - directory where configuration files are located
• defaultEnv (optional, defaults to default) - name of the default env (default json file)
• cache (optional, defaults to true) - whether to cache config values for future calls to load()

If you don't need environment-specific configuration, you can just create default.json in your config directory, and leave out the environment parameter when calling load():

confide({configDir: CONFIG_DIR}).load(function (err, defaultConfig) {
  defaultConfig.showLogMsgs; // true
});

If cache is enabled (it is by default) and you wish to focibly reload your configuration, just call the reload() method with the same parameters as load():

var conf = confide({configDir: CONFIG_DIR});
conf.load('production', function (err, mergedConfig) {
  mergedConfig.showLogMsgs; // false

  // production.json updated on the file system...
  conf.reload('production', function (err, mergedConfig) {
    mergedConfig.showLogMsgs; // true
  });
});