Question

I want to write a program that sends an e-mail to one or more specified recipients when a certain event occurs. For this I need the user to write the parameters for the mail server into a config. Possible values are for example: serveradress, ports, ssl(true/false) and a list of desired recipients.

Whats the user-friendliest/best-practice way to do this?

I could of course use a python file with the correct parameters and the user has to fill it out, but I wouldn’t consider this user friendly. I also read about the ‘config’ module in python, but it seems to me that it’s made for creating config files on its own, and not to have users fill the files out themselves.

Answer 1

Are you saying that the fact that the config file would need to be valid Python makes it unfriendly? It seems like having lines in a file like:

 server = 'mail.domain.com'
 port = 25

…etc would be intuitive enough while still being valid Python. If you don’t want the user to have to know that they have to quote strings, though, you might go the YAML route. I use YAML pretty much exclusively for config files and find it very intuitive, and it would also be intuitive for an end user I think (though it requires a third-party module – PyYAML):

 server: mail.domain.com
 port: 25

Having pyyaml load it is simple:

>>> import yaml
>>> yaml.load("""a: 1
... b: foo
... """)
{'a': 1, 'b': 'foo'}

With a file it’s easy too.

>>> with open('myconfig.yaml', 'r') as cfile:
...    config = yaml.load(cfile)
... 

config now contains all of the parameters.