HowToSetConfigValuesFromTheOutside

How to set config and metadata values from external files

When working in a team, it is customary that database names, user names and passwords and other data are different for each developer or development machine. Since these data is usually stores in an application's Config.yaml file, this prevents to keep the file under version control unless each developer has it own different copy, which is a burden to maintain.

You can do that through environment variables, which in Kitto you can embed into any metadata files just by surrounding them with % characters, or you can do in a more local way by moving the data to separate files.

The %FILE()% macro

One of the uses of Kitto's %FILE()% macro (there can be many others) is to allow you to push personal data outside Config.yaml and into local files that are never kept under version control. Example:

Databases:
  Main: DBX
    Connection:
      DriverName: MSSQL
      HostName: %FILE(%HOME_PATH%.dbhostname.local)%
      DataBase: %FILE(%HOME_PATH%.dbname.local)%
      OS Authentication: True             

Just create local files named .dbhostname.local and .dbname.local, put the host/instance name in the former and the catalog name in the latter, and make sure those files are ignored by your version control system. When processing the %FILE()% macro, Kitto will expand the file name, load and expand the file contents (meaning that both name and contents may contain other macros).

Another example:

Auth: DB
  Defaults:
    UserName: %FILE(%HOME_PATH%.username.local)%
    Password: %FILE(%HOME_PATH%.password.local)%

For more details, see the Macros page.