Chapter 13. Configuration Files and Persistence
A configuration file is a form of object persistence. It contains a serialized, editable representation of some default state for an application program or server. We'll expand on our serialization techniques for the object representation shown in Chapter 9, Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML to create configuration files.
In addition to having a plain-text editable configuration file, we must also design our application to be configurable. Further, we must define some kind of configuration object (or collection) that our application can use. In many cases, we'll have a series of default values that include system-wide defaults and user-specific overrides to those defaults. We'll look at six representations for the configuration data:
INI files use a format that was pioneered as part of Windows. It's popular in part because it is an incumbent format, and many other configuration files might use this notation.
PY files are...
