Config schema files

In order to support needed operations like merging on key collisions, you cannot provide Ranvier with your raw config file. Ranvier requires a specific (yet simple) JSON format. For example, let's say we have config for our user's service that we'll store in users.json

{
  "extends": [
    "staging.json"
  ],
  "config": {
    "db": {
      "hostname": "pg.mycompany.com",
      "port": 5432
    }
  }
}

There are two fields that are most relevant here, extends and config. These are the minimum required fields for a valid Ranvier config schema. This tells Ranvier that you have a config file with the name users and it stores DB connection info. It also tells Ranvier that the base of this JSON file should be the staging.json file.

Extends

The extends field allows you to keep common config values stored in one place e.g. environment-wide config. Any file which extends another will contain the values of the config field as well as its own. In the case of a key collision between the files, the "inheritor" (or users.json in this case), will take precedence. Extends contains a list of string filepaths which are relative to the root of your Git repo. Meaning if you have a Git repo that looks like

├── users.json
└── env
    ├── staging.json
    └── prod.json

And you wanted to extend env/staging.json in users.json the schema file would look like

{
  "extends": [
    "env/staging.json"
  ],
  "config": {
    ...
  }
}

And now users.json will store all of the config listed in the config field as well as all of the config listed in env.staging.json.

More info

For more detailed info, see the model itself.