File Layout

Just Getting Started?

If you're just starting out, you don't really need to worry about this information. I'd recommend just using a settings.yml file.

When you chamber init, you'll get a settings.yml file which is typically dropped in the correct location so that when Chamber is loaded, it picks it up automatically.

Once your settings.yml starts getting unwieldy, you can feel free to come back here and see the different ways you can break your settings up to make them more organized.

Venturing On...

Ok, so your settings.yml is starting to get a little too crazy for your tastes. And now you may be wondering how to wrangle it into something more managable.

Chamber gives you plenty of options.

Let's take a look at an example which contains a lot of Chamber's different file nameing and layout options:

Example Structure

<basepath>/settings
|
|-- email
|    |
|    |-- addresses.yml
|    |-- smtp
|         |
|         |-- servers.yml
|         |-- servers-myhostname.yml
|         |-- servers-production.yml
|
|-- http
|    |
|    |-- main.yml
|    |-- webclient.yml
|
|-- sidekiq
|    |
|    |-- main.yml.erb
|    |-- queues.yml
|
|-- redis.yml.erb
|-- redis.test.yml
|-- settings.yml.erb
|-- stripe.yml.erb

How Chamber Interprets Your Structure

Hint: it doesn't.

As far as Chamber is concerned, the structure of your files has no bearing on how you access the contents of those files. They are for your organizational purposes only. You could create a file named servers.yml that had this content:

stripe:
  api_key: 'mykey'

And Chamber doesn't care. It'll happily serve up mykey if you ask it for Chamber.dig!('stripe', 'api_key').

This makes Chamber extremely flexible. You can lay your files out however works best for your project. Now, granted, the above example seems kind of dumb, but what if you had a servers.yml and wanted to do this?

redis:
  url: 'redis://localhost:9876'

smtp:
  url: 'https://cache.example.com'

database:
  url: 'https://db.example.com'

You could access these as you'd expect:

• Chamber.dig!('redis', 'url')
• Chamber.dig!('smtp', 'url')
• Chamber.dig!('database', 'url')

Now this starts to make a bit more sense. Do I do this? No. But everyone thinks differently and if this organization makes more sense for you, Chamber will let you do it.

Additional Topics

ERB Preprocessing

For full information on ERB preprocessing, check out the full guide here but I just want to note here that your filename does not have to end in .erb to be run through ERB. Every file is run through it. Having the .yml.erb extension can just make it easier for editors to syntax highlight properly.

Namespaced Files

You'll notice in the above example that some of the files have things like production and test and myhostname in them. What are these weird-looking filenames? You can find a full description here.

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Next Step: Defining Settings