[kyllo]

It really depends on the environment and culture. In Python web apps for example it's very popular to keep project configuration in Python dicts and lists, which are just Python code (as opposed to using something like YAML or JSON for config).

[hcarvalhoalves]

Popular, but an anti-pattern. People start including production configuration as a module inside the build.

The Right Way (TM) is loading from env vars.

[kyllo]

By "inside the build" do you mean in the git repo?

Because there isn't really a such thing as a "build" for a Python web app, it's a dynamic language. It's not like Java where you'd have to recompile the whole app if you packaged your config inside the compiled jar.

In Django apps, there's an env var called DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE that points to one of multiple settings.py files, and you change that var depending on which environment you're working in. Then typically you also would want to store individual variables that need to be secure (stuff like any secret keys and database credentials) in env vars, but the overall structure of your config is just a python dict in settings.py.

For reasons that Yegge touches on in the blog post I linked above, you really want a tree structure for configuration of any complexity, and env vars don't provide that.

[Goladus]

I think he means that the configuration file is on the library path is read using an import statement rather than parsed explicitly from a standard path like etc/.

[warfangle]

Well, technically, JSON is just a Plain Old Javascript Object, with restrictions (no expressions, quoted keys).

[kyllo]

Sort of, at least in the sense that you can eval JSON from JS code rather than having to parse it yourself. This is one of many language concepts that JavaScript cribbed from the Lisp/Scheme family of functional languages.