Question

I’m working on a CherryPy application based on what I found on that BitBucket repository.

As in this example, there is two config files, server.cfg (aka “global”) and app.cfg.

Both config files are loaded in the serve.py file :

# Update the global settings for the HTTP server and engine
cherrypy.config.update(os.path.join(self.conf_path, "server.cfg"))

# ...

# Our application
from webapp.app import Twiseless
webapp = Twiseless()
# Let's mount the application so that CherryPy can serve it
app = cherrypy.tree.mount(webapp, '/', os.path.join(self.conf_path, "app.cfg"))

Now, I’d like to add the Database configuration.
My first thought was to add it in the server.cfg (is this the best place? or should it be located in app.cfg ?).

But if I add the Database configuration in the server.cfg, I don’t know how to access it.
Using :

cherrypy.request.app.config['Database']

Works only if the [Database] parameter is in the app.cfg.

I tried to print cherrypy.request.app.config, and it shows me only the values defined in app.cfg, nothing in server.cfg.

So I have two related question :

• Is it best to put the database connection in the server.cfg or app.cfg file
• How to access server.cfg configuration (aka global) in my code

Thanks for your help! 🙂

Answer 1

Put it in the app config. A good question to help you decide where to put such things is, “if I mounted an unrelated blog app at /blogs on the same server, would I want it to share that config?” If so, put it in server config. If not, put it in app config.

Note also that the global config isn’t sectioned, so you can’t stick a [Database] section in there anyway. Only the app config allows sections. If you wanted to stick database settings in the global config anyway, you’d have to consider config entry names like “database_port” instead. You would then access it directly by that name: cherrypy.config.get("database_port").