PRAW comes with a praw.ini
file in the package directory, and looks for user defined
praw.ini
files in a few other locations:
In the current working directory at the time :class:`.Reddit` is initialized.
In the launching user's config directory. This directory, if available, is detected in order as one of the following:
In the directory specified by the
XDG_CONFIG_HOME
environment variable on operating systems that define such an environment variable (some modern Linux distributions).In the directory specified by
$HOME/.config
if theHOME
environment variable is defined (Linux and Mac OS systems).In the directory specified by the
APPDATA
environment variable (Windows).Note
To check the values of the environment variables, you can open up a terminal (Terminal/Terminal.app/Command Prompt/Powershell) and echo the variables (replacing <variable> with the name of the variable):
MacOS/Linux:
echo "$<variable>"
Windows Command Prompt
echo "%<variable>%"
Powershell
Write-Output "$env:<variable>"
You can also view environment variables in Python:
import os print(os.environ.get("<variable>", ""))
praw.ini
uses the INI file format, which
can contain multiple groups of settings separated into sections. PRAW refers to each
section as a site
. The default site, DEFAULT
, is provided in the package's
praw.ini
file. This site defines the default settings for interaction with Reddit.
The contents of the package's praw.ini
file are:
.. literalinclude:: ../../../praw/praw.ini :language: ini
Warning
Avoid modifying the package's praw.ini
file. Prefer instead to override its
values in your own praw.ini
file. You can even override settings of the
DEFAULT
site in user defined praw.ini
files.
In addition to the DEFAULT
site, additional sites can be configured in user defined
praw.ini
files. All sites inherit settings from the DEFAULT
site and can
override whichever settings desired.
Defining additional sites is a convenient way to store :ref:`OAuth credentials <oauth_options>` for various accounts, or distinct OAuth applications. For example if you have three separate bots, you might create a site for each:
[bot1]
client_id=Y4PJOclpDQy3xZ
client_secret=UkGLTe6oqsMk5nHCJTHLrwgvHpr
password=pni9ubeht4wd50gk
username=fakebot1
[bot2]
client_id=6abrJJdcIqbclb
client_secret=Kcn6Bj8CClyu4FjVO77MYlTynfj
password=mi1ky2qzpiq8s59j
username=fakebot2
[bot3]
client_id=SI8pN3DSbt0zor
client_secret=xaxkj7HNh8kwg8e5t4m6KvSrbTI
password=1guiwevlfo00esyy
username=fakebot3
Site selection is done via the site_name
parameter to :class:`.Reddit`. For example,
to use the settings defined for bot2
as shown above, initialize :class:`.Reddit`
like so:
reddit = praw.Reddit("bot2", user_agent="bot2 user agent")
Note
In the above example you can obviate passing user_agent
if you add the setting
user_agent=...
in the [bot2]
site definition.
A site can also be selected via a praw_site
environment variable. This approach has
precedence over the site_name
parameter described above.
By default PRAW doesn't apply any interpolation on the config file but this can be
changed with the config_interpolation
parameter which can be set to "basic" or
"extended".
This can be useful to separate the components of the user_agent
into individual
variables, for example:
[bot1]
bot_name=MyBot
bot_version=1.2.3
bot_author=MyUser
user_agent=script:%(bot_name)s:v%(bot_version)s (by u/%(bot_author)s)
This uses basic interpolation thus :class:`.Reddit` need to be initialized as follows:
reddit = praw.Reddit("bot1", config_interpolation="basic")
Then the value of reddit.config.user_agent
will be script:MyBot:v1.2.3 (by
u/MyUser)
.
See Interpolation of values for details.
Warning
The ConfigParser instance is cached internally at the class level, it is shared across all instances of :class:`.Reddit` and once set it's not overridden by future invocations.