Which is the best way to allow configuration options be overridden at the command line in Python?

Question

I have a Python application which needs quite a few (~30) configuration parameters. Up to now, I used the OptionParser class to define default values in the app itself, with

Answer 1

Check out ConfigArgParse - its a new PyPI package (open source) that serves as a drop in replacement for argparse with added support for config files and environment variables.

Answer 2

I'm using ConfigParser and argparse with subcommands to handle such tasks. The important line in the code below is:

subp.set_defaults(**dict(conffile.items(subn)))

This will set the defaults of the subcommand (from argparse) to the values in the section of the config file.

A more complete example is below:

####### content of example.cfg:
# [sub1]
# verbosity=10
# gggg=3.5
# [sub2]
# host=localhost

import ConfigParser
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers()

parser_sub1 = subparsers.add_parser('sub1')
parser_sub1.add_argument('-V','--verbosity', type=int, dest='verbosity')
parser_sub1.add_argument('-G', type=float, dest='gggg')

parser_sub2 = subparsers.add_parser('sub2')
parser_sub2.add_argument('-H','--host', dest='host')

conffile = ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser()
conffile.read('example.cfg')

for subp, subn in ((parser_sub1, "sub1"), (parser_sub2, "sub2")):
    subp.set_defaults(**dict(conffile.items(subn)))

print parser.parse_args(['sub1',])
# Namespace(gggg=3.5, verbosity=10)
print parser.parse_args(['sub1', '-V', '20'])
# Namespace(gggg=3.5, verbosity=20)
print parser.parse_args(['sub1', '-V', '20', '-G','42'])
# Namespace(gggg=42.0, verbosity=20)
print parser.parse_args(['sub2', '-H', 'www.example.com'])
# Namespace(host='www.example.com')
print parser.parse_args(['sub2',])
# Namespace(host='localhost')