Gosettings

gosettings is a Go package providing helper functions for working with settings.

Go.dev documentation:

Add it to your Go project with:

go get github.com/qdm12/gosettings

💁 Only compatible with Go 1.18+ since it now uses generics.

Features:

Define settings struct methods:
- Copy: use gosettings.CopyPointer and gosettings.CopySlice
- SetDefaults: gosettings.Default* functions (see pkg.go.dev/github.com/qdm12/gosettings)
- OverrideWith: gosettings.OverrideWith* functions (see pkg.go.dev/github.com/qdm12/gosettings)
- Validate: validate.* functions from github.com/qdm12/gosettings/validate
Reading settings from multiple sources with precedence with github.com/qdm12/gosettings/reader
- Environment variable implementation env.New(env.Settings{Environ: os.Environ()}) in subpackage github.com/qdm12/gosettings/reader/sources/env
- Flag implementation flag.New(os.Args) in subpackage github.com/qdm12/gosettings/reader/sources/flag
Minor feature notes:
- No use of reflect for better runtime safety
- Single dependency on kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/libcap/cap to validate listening ports for programs with Linux capabalities

Philosophy

After having worked with Go and settings from different sources for years, I have come with a design I am happy with.

Settings struct

Each component has a settings struct, where the zero value of a field should be meaningless. For example, if the value 0 is allowed for a field, then it must be an *int field. On the contrary, you could have an int field if the zero value 0 is meaningless. The reasoning behind this is that you want the zero Go value to be considered as 'unset field' so that the field value can be defaulted and overridden by another settings struct. See the below interface comments for more details on what this allows.

Next, each of your settings struct should ideally implement the following interface:

type Settings interface {
 // SetDefaults sets default values for all unset fields.
 // All pointer fields must be defaulted to a non nil value.
 // Usage:
 // - Once on the base settings at the start of the program.
 // - If the user requests a reset of the settings, on an empty settings struct.
 SetDefaults()
 // Validate validates all the settings and return an error if any field value is invalid.
 // It should only be called after `SetDefaults()` is called, and therefore should assume
 // all pointer fields are set and NOT nil.
 // Usage:
 // - Validate settings early at program start
 // - Validate new settings given, after calling .Copy() + .OverrideWith(newSettings)
 Validate() (err error)
 // Copy deep copies all the settings to a new Settings object.
 // Usage:
 // - Copy settings before modifying them with OverrideWith(), to validate them with Validate() before actually using them.
 Copy() Settings
 // OverrideWith sets all the set values of the other settings to the fields of the receiver settings.
 // Usage:
 // - Update settings at runtime
 OverrideWith(other Settings)
 // ToLinesNode returns a (tree) node with the settings as lines, for displaying settings
 // in a formatted tree, where you can nest settings node to display a full settings tree.
 ToLinesNode() *gotree.Node
 // String returns the string representation of the settings.
 // It should simply return `s.ToLinesNode().String()` to show a tree of settings.
 String() string
}

💁 This is my recommendation, and obviously you don't need to:

define this interface
have all these methods exported
define ToLinesNode with gotree if you don't want to

➡️ Example settings implementation

More concrete settings implementation examples using this library are notably:

Settings methods usage

In the following Go examples, we use the example settings implementation.

Read settings from multiple sources

The Reader from the github.com/qdm12/gosettings/reader package can be used to read and parse settings from one or more sources. A source implements the interface:

type Source interface {
 String() string
 Get(key string) (value string, isSet bool)
 KeyTransform(key string) string
}

There are already defined sources such as reader.Env for environment variables.

A simple example (runnable here) would be:

flagSource := flag.New([]string{"program", "--key1=A"})
envSource := env.New(env.Settings{Environ: []string{"KEY1=B", "KEY2=2"}})
reader := reader.New(reader.Settings{
  Sources: []reader.Source{flagSource, envSource},
})

value := reader.String("KEY1")
// flag source takes precedence
fmt.Println(value) // Prints "A"

n, err := reader.Int("KEY2")
if err != nil {
  panic(err)
}
// flag source has no value, so the environment
// variable source is used.
fmt.Println(n) // Prints "2"