# setty - Opitionated Configuration
`setty` is a facade over several configuration libraries providing **turn-key config system with sane defaults**.
## Problem
Popular configuration crates like `config` and `figment` deal with **reading** and **merging** values from multiple sources. They leave it up to you to handle **parsing** using `serde` derives. This is a good separation of concerns, but it leaves a lot of important details to you. Like remembering to put `#[serde(deny_unknown_fields)]` not to realize that your production config had no effect because of a small typo.
Also, you may need features beyond parsing:
- Documentation generation
- JSONSchema generation *(e.g. for Helm chart values validation)*
- Auto-completion in CLI
- Deprecation mechanism
Layering more libraries and macros makes your models **very verbose**:
```rust
#[derive(Debug, PartialEq, Eq, serde::Deserialize, serde::Serialize, serde_valid::Validate, schemars::JsonSchema)]
#[serde(deny_unknown_fields, rename_all = "camelCase")]
struct AppConfig {
#[serde(default)]
database: DatabaseConfig,
#[validate(min_length = 5)]
username: String,
#[serde(default = "AppConfig::default_hostname")]
hostname: String,
// !! DO NOT USE !!!
password: Option<String>
}
impl AppConfig {
fn default_hostname() -> String {
"localhost".into()
}
}
```
And even if you power through this problem in your application - you'll face a **composability** problem of surfacing configuration from the modules you depend on. If a config object defined in a module does not use your ideal set of derive macros - you'll be forced to deplicating its structure in a temporary DTO and writing a mapping between them. Yet more boilerplate.
## Solution
Use one simple macro:
```rust
#[derive(setty::Config)]
struct AppConfig {
/// Docstrings appear in Markdown and JSON Schema outputs
database: DatabaseConfig,
/// Everything is optional by default - required attributes are explicit
#[config(required, validate(min_length = 5))]
username: String,
/// Default can be specified in-line and support full expressions
#[config(default = "localhost")]
hostname: String,
/// Use of deptecated values can be reported as warnings or fail strict validation
#[config(deprecated = "Avoid specifying password in config file")]
password: Option<String>
}
```
Control what behavior you need via create features:
```toml
setty = {
version = "*",
features = [
"derive-debug",
"derive-eq",
"derive-deserialize",
"derive-serialize",
"derive-jsonschema",
"derive-validate",
"fmt-toml",
"fmt-json",
"fmt-yaml",
]
}
```
By specifying features **only** at the top-level application crate - the desired derives will be applied to configs of **all crates in your dependency tree** allowing you to directly embed their DTOs. In other words library developers don't have to predict and align every single aspect of configuration with the app layer - they can focus only on types and validation.
## Alternatives
- Rolling your own declarative macros (see example in [`datafusion`](https://github.com/apache/datafusion/blob/b463a9f9e3c9603eb2db7113125fea3a1b7f5455/datafusion/common/src/config.rs#L2480))