How can I access a custom section in a Pyramid .ini file?

Question

I'm currently writing a data collection service for multiple services. There are probably 5 different API Endpoints with differing hosts & port numbers. I wanted to create a settings file for this but thought that the .ini should be a better place, or so I thought...

My development.ini looks something like this:

[app:main]
use = egg:awesomeproject
auth.tkt = 'abc'
auth.secret = 'I love python'

mongodb.host = 'somehost'
mongodb.port= 6379

[server:main]
use = egg:waitress#main
host = 0.0.0.0
port = 6543

[user:sg:qa]
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 1234

[customer:sg:qa]
host = 127.0.0.2
port = 4567

I tried to access the custom sections within a pyramid event like such:

def add_api_path(event):
    request = event.request
    settings = request.registry.settings
    _type = 'customer:sg:qa'
    base_config = settings[_type]

But that didn't work, because settings is actually a dict of the [app:main] attributes. Can someone teach me the way to access the sections the Pyramid way? I read about another way, using ConfigParser, but I wanted to ask if there's any other easier way in Pyramid first.

Answer 1

If you want to do that you'll have to parse the config file yourself. The section-isolation behavior you're seeing is intentional.

def main(global_conf, **settings):
    parser = ConfigParser({'here': global_conf['__here__']})
    parser.read(global_conf['__file__'])
    for k, v in parser.items('user:sg:qa'):
        settings['user:sg:qa:' + k] = v

    config = Configurator(settings=settings)

Then later you can grab the settings:

request.registry.settings['user:sg:qa:host']

update

In Pyramid 1.9 the ini parsing was made pluggable and a new library was created to assist in loading arbitrary sections of the file in a standard way. Below is the updated example:

import plaster

def main(global_conf, **settings):
    user_settings = plaster.get_settings(global_conf['__file__'], 'user:sg:qa')
    for k, v in user_settings.items():
        settings['user:sg:qa:' + k] = v

    config = Configurator(settings=settings)