Metadata for configuration data point

[ThomDietrich]

Hey friends,
does Dynaconf support metadata alongside it's managed configuration? How would one go about adding further details about a data point? Examples would be the owner or source of a setting, range and restrictions, or a short description for UI explanation.

For my specific use case (data science lab work) I would prefer metadata alongside the value, however I can see that for many production software this might probably find its way into another related file in parallel.

Is there any support for metadata in the context of Dynaconf or would you guys have a recommendation for a best practice solution? Thanks!

[rochacbruno]

This must be resolved with the 4.0 implementation of typing #683

[rochacbruno]

Now with #1107 we can add Annotated[T, Metadata(x=y)]

[ThomDietrich]

Hey Bruno,
fond to see this ticket is still considered.

Without deeper study of the change I am unsure whether this indeed resolves my question. I was hoping for the ability to add metadata in the settings.{toml|yaml|ini|json|py} file itself or a second file in parallel. The ability to do value validation is one obvious use case, but I would also find it useful to add documentation per parameter, e.g. for UI presentation or to show alongside a validation error.

I have to add that I am not a full-time software developer or current user of dynaconf. This ticket is from two years ago when I was happy to have found dynaconf and confused by the lack of metadata :)

Does that make sense? Cheers!

[rochacbruno]

Hi @ThomDietrich, yes I think the new schema based settings will be the way to solve the issue

Example:

class Settings(Dynaconf):
    host: Annotated[str, Description("The server hostname"), Metadata(foo="bar")]
    post: Annotated[int, Description("Server port")] = 5050

With a schema class like the one above you will be able to run:

$ dynaconf template-settings-file yaml > settings.yaml

IT will output

# The server hostname
# foo: bar
# required: true
# type: str
host:

# Server port
# type: int
port: 5050

So with the information in a schema on a .py file we will be able to dump the information to multiple purposes, can be templating the settings file as above or generating a json-schema for UI purposes.

[ThomDietrich]

I see. Amazing!! That looks great and does solve my request. If this is already documented please feel free to close the ticket :) Thanks again!