Add default config file to src/

[drivendata]

Add default config file to src/

[pjbull]

Hey @ohenrik thanks for the thoughts. Generally, we want anything that varies from machine to machine to be stored in the environment. Check out the 12-factor app's section on configuration for more reasons why.

Projects with a large number of settings do grow into having a separate importable settings or config module (e.g., a django application). My inclination is to keep things simple by default and not roll our own settings module that would need development/support/documentation at the base level of the cookiecutter.

Happy to consider if there are really compelling use cases for needing a config.py as a default, but I think environment variables will cover most of them.

[epogrebnyak]

Hope the question fits here... what about a helper module or src/settings.py to access data folder?

In src/data/make_data.py you have:

https://github.com/drivendata/cookiecutter-data-science/blob/be7f8d76b2c542a1f355046d132d6fd39b0b2a6d/%7B%7B%20cookiecutter.repo_name%20%7D%7D/src/data/make_dataset.py#L23-L24

Myself I use something like below to locate the repo root folder:

from pathlib import Path
DATA_PATH = Path(__file__).parents[2] / 'data'

def make_data_path(folder: str, file_name: str) -> str:
    folder = DATA_PATH / folder
    if not folder.exists():
        folder.mkdir(parents=True)
    return str(folder / file_name)

Once the data directory structure is there template, maybe path to it should be in src/settings.py too? For me it is seems a good convenience feature.

[isms]

Closing as possible in the future but based on participation in this question issue it's not a commonly desired feature (or is easily slotted in on a per-project basis).