flagga

flagga is an extensible Go library for handling program configuration using (but not limited to) command line arguments, environment variables and JSON.

This idea and API come from Peter Bourgon's Go for Industrial Programming talk at Gophercon Iceland 2018.

It should work as a drop-in replacement for the standard library flag package. The only difference is the fact that NewFlagSet and Init accept a second string for the description.

Goals

• Be able to configure a program with different sources that have different priorities.
• Be extensible so anyone can extend the API to provide different sources to get their configuration from (yaml, toml, database?, ...).
• Be a drop-in replacement for the Go standard flag package with extra features.
• Have no third-party dependencies.

Install

go get github.com/erizocosmico/flagga

Or use your preferred dependency manager such as dep or vgo.

Usage

var fs flagga.FlagSet

db := fs.String("db", defaultDBURI, "database connection string", flagga.Env("DBURI"))
users := fs.StringList("users", nil, "list of allowed users", flagga.JSON("users"))

err := fs.Parse(os.Args[1:], flagga.JSONVia("config.json"), flagga.EnvPrefix("MYAPP_"))
if err != nil {
    // handle err
}

fmt.Println(*db) // Outputs: "user@localhost:1234/foo"
fmt.Println(strings.Join(*users, ", ")) // Outputs: "jane, joe, alice"

To get the previous results we can invoke the program in the following ways:

echo '{"users":["jane", "joe", "alice"]}' > config.json
./myprogram -db=user@localhost:1234/foo -users=jane -users=joe -users=alice
MYAPP_DBURI=user@localhost:1234/foo ./myprogram

Priority of sources

CLI flags always have priority over environment variables or JSON keys. If a flag is provided using the command line flags, no other sources will be checked for that variable.

The rest of the priorities depend of the order in which the sources are passed to the Parse method. For example, fs.Parse(os.Args, flagga.EnvPrefix("FOO_"), flagga.JSONVia("cfg")) gives more priority to environment variables than to the JSON configuration.

Available Extractors

• Env: from environment variable sources.
• JSON: from JSON sources.

YAML and TOML extractors are available in the flaggax repository.

Available Sources

• EnvPrefix: provides all environment variables matching the given prefix.
• JSONVia: provides the content of the JSON in the given file.

YAML and TOML sources are available in the flaggax repository.

Custom Sources and Extractors

You can implement your own Sources and Extractors in case your configuration is in a different format. Check out the Source and Extractor interfaces in the package documentation.

Reference

• Go flag package
• Go for Industrial Programming by Peter Bourgon

License

MIT, see LICENSE