Configure your Node.js Applications

Introduction

Node-config organizes hierarchical configurations for your app deployments.

It lets you define a set of default parameters, and extend them for different deployment environments (development, qa, staging, production, etc.).

Configurations are stored in configuration files within your application, and can be overridden and extended by environment variables, command line parameters, or external sources.

This gives your application a consistent configuration interface shared among a growing list of npm modules also using node-config.

Project Guidelines

Simple - Get started fast
Powerful - For multi-node enterprise deployment
Flexible - Supporting multiple config file formats
Lightweight - Small file and memory footprint
Predictable - Well tested foundation for module and app developers

Quick Start

The following examples are in JSON format, but configurations can be in other file formats.

Install in your app directory, and edit the default config file.

$ npm install config
$ mkdir config
$ vi config/default.json

{
  // Customter module configs
  "Customer": {
    "dbConfig": {
      "host": "localhost",
      "port": 5984,
      "dbName": "customers"
    },
    "credit": {
      "initialLimit": 100,
      // Set low for development
      "initialDays": 1
    }
  }
}

Edit config overrides for production deployment:

$ vi config/production.json

{
  "Customer": {
    "dbConfig": {
      "host": "prod-db-server"
    },
    "credit": {
      "initialDays": 30
    }
  }
}

Use configs in your code:

var config = require('config');
...
var dbConfig = config.get('Customer.dbConfig');
db.connect(dbConfig, ...);

Start your app server:

$ export NODE_ENV=production
$ node my-app.js

Running in this configuration, the port and dbName elements of dbConfig will come from the default.json file, and the host element will come from the production.json override file.

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Contributors

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Osterjour	jberrisch	nitzan-shaked	Alaneor	roncli	keis
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License

May be freely distributed under the MIT license.