Unifig

Unifig is a pluggable system for loading external variables from one or more providers (e.g. ENV).

If you are using a framework you should install the associated gem:

If you want to use Unifig outside of a framework listed above you can manually add it to your project.

Add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'unifig', '~> 0.4.0'

Or install it manually:

$ gem install unifig --version '~> 0.4.0'

This project uses Semantic Versioning. Check out GitHub releases for a detailed list of changes.

Unifig works by loading a YAML configuration that instructs it on how to retrieve and treat external variables. Variable values are retrieved from an ordered list of providers.

A provider is any source where you would retrieve variable values. Unifig comes with a local provider which reads values straight from the configuration file. Additional providers may be installed:

Providers are checked in order to find the variable values. If a variable is not found in the first provider, it will be requested from the second provider and so on until it is found.

The YAML configuration should begin with a unifig key which lists the providers in the order you would like them checked:

unifig:
  providers: [local, env]

You can list a single provider or an ordered array to check.

Variables should be listed after the unifig key as their own keys. Here's a mininal example YAML:

unifig:
  providers: local

HELLO: "world"

When this YAML is loaded, Unifig will add two methods to it's core Unifig class. The first, Unifig.hello will return "hello" as the value it found from the local provider. The second method, Unifig.hello? allow you to check to see if the value was able to be retrived at all.

> Unifig.hello?
# true
> Unifig.hello
# => "world"

Each variable listed in the YAML configuration will receive its own pair of methods on Unifig.

Variables can be listed with the local value immediately following as seen above. They can also be defined with no local value:

HELLO:

Or they can be declared with the verbose syntax:

HELLO:
  value: "world"

The verbose syntax is useful when additional configration is need as seen in the Advanced section.

Loading a YAML configuration can be accomplished using the Unifig::Init class. From Unifig::Init you can load the YAML as a string with .load or as a file with .load_file.

NOTE: If you're using one of the framework gems, loading may be handled for you.

Loading from a string:

Unifig::Init.load(<<~YML)
  unifig:
    providers: local

  HELLO: "world"
YML

Loading from a file:

Unifig::Init.load_file('unifig.yml')

Different working environments may require different setups. This can be accomplished in the unifig key or within variable keys with the envs key.

Assuming two environments, developement and production, let's say we want to use different providers for each. Whatever we set at the top level will operate as the default. From there we can use the envs key to override that behavior:

unifig:
  providers: local
  envs:
    production:
      providers: env

HELLO: "world"

In the development environment we'll check the local provider but in production we'll use env. This will result with Unifig.hello returning "world" in development and whatever the value of the HELLO environment variable is in production. To select an environment, add it to Unifig::Init.load or Unifig::Init.load_file:

Unifig::Init.load(<<~YML, env: :development)
  unifig:
    providers: local
    envs:
      production:
        providers: env

  HELLO: "world"
YML

NOTE: If you're using one of the framework gems, environments may be loaded automatically depending on the framework.

In addition to changing unifig, envs may be used inside variables. Any variable configuration may be overridden using envs:

HELLO:
  value: "world"
  envs:
    production:
      value: "universe"

Here we've set the local provider value to "world" for all environments with an override setting it to "universe" in the production environment.

Variables can be used in other variables with ${VAR}.

USER:
SERVICE_USERNAME: "${USER}_at_service"

Order of the variables does not matter but cyclical dependencies will throw an error.

By default, all values are converted to strings. If you want the value to be something other than a string you can assign a specific conversion. Unifig comes with some basic built-in conversions or you can convert to any class available.

In order to convert a value you can provide a type to convert:

THREADS:
  value: 5
  convert: integer

Conversion works regardless of the provider of the value.

There are a number of built-in types available. Basic types that have no additional options include string (the default), symbol, float, and decimal (i.e. BigDecimal).

The integer type assumes base 10. This can be overridden by providing a base option:

BINARY_INPUT:
  convert:
    type: integer
    base: 2

Unifig also provides date, date_time, and time all of which use parse by default. Any of them can be provided with a format option if you want to specify the format of the input. The format option uses strptime for the conversion. You can find all valid formats by looking at the standard Ruby documentation.

STARTS_ON:
  convert:
    type: date
    format: %Y-%m-%d

Any available class can be used as a converter by providing the class name as the converter. By default, new will be called on the class with the value passed in. To use a different method provide it via the method option.

IP_ADDRESS:
  convert: IPAddr
ENCODING:
  convert:
    type: Encoding
    method: find

After loading the configuration you can use Unifig::Vars to check on what happened. It will return a list of Unifig::Vars with information such as which provider supplied the value.

API Documentation

If you want to contribute to Unifig, please read our contribution guidelines. A complete list of contributors is available on GitHub.

Unifig is licensed under the MIT License.