wesleylancel/confy

Helping developers seperate config from code

Confy

Helping developers seperate config from code

This is a product being built by the Assembly community. You can help push this idea forward by visiting https://assemblymade.com/confy.

A good web app stores config in env vars. As the amount of config variables is high, developers can use "Confy" to pull their config from the cloud using a single env var.

Development

Prerequisites are:

• Node.js v0.10.x
• CouchDB v1.2.x [dbname: confy]

$ git clone git://github.com/asm-products/confy && cd confy

$ export MAILGUN_API_KEY="key-ivd0lsd91b1bvw31mw7"
$ export MAILGUN_DOMAIN="sample.mailgun.org"

$ npm install && node test/setup.js

$ node app.js

Idea

Confy is a SaaS product where web app developers can store their application config in the cloud and retrieve it when starting up their app.

An app’s config is everything that is likely to vary between deploys (staging, production, developer environments, etc). This includes:

• Resource handles to the database, Memcached, and other backing services
• Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter
• Per-deploy values such as the canonical hostname for the deploy

The most popular approach to config currently is the use of config files such as config/database.yml in Rails. The main drawback of this is that its easy for the developer to check in a config file to the repo. We have all seen some popular HN posts about problems appearing out of this practice.

Heroku and other platforms encourage using environment variables for storing config. But it takes a lot of effort to both setup and maintain them.

Confy proposes a new method of approach for this problem. Developer sets a single environment variable. This is used by confy module/package in their app to load the config from the cloud.

A litmus test for whether an app has all config correctly factored out of the code is whether the codebase could be made open source at any moment, without compromising any credentials.

The above proposed approach passes the above litmus test.

(A few of the above quotes are taken directly from 12factor.net)

How Assembly Works

Assembly products are like open-source and made with contributions from the community. Assembly handles the boring stuff like hosting, support, financing, legal, etc. Once the product launches we collect the revenue and split the profits amongst the contributors.

Visit https://assemblymade.com to learn more.