The Meta Object

The return value of get_config() returns a named-tuple which not only contains the parsed config instance, but also some additional meta-data.

Before version 5.0 this information was melded into the returned config instance.

The reason this was split this way in version 5.0, is because with this version, the return type is defined by the handlers. Now, handlers may have return-types which cannot easily get additional values grafted onto them (at least not explicitly). To keep it clear and understandable, the values are now explicitly returned separately! This give the handler total freedom of which data-type they work with, and still retain useful meta-data for the end-user.

The meta-object is accessible via the second return value from get_config():

_, meta = get_config('foo', 'bar')

Or via the meta attribute on the returned named-tuple:

result = get_config('foo', 'bar')
meta = result.meta

At the time of this writing, the meta-object contains the following attributes:

active_path

A list of path names were used to look for files (in order of the lookup)

loaded_files

A list of filenames which have been loaded (in order of loading)

config_id

The internal ID used to identify the application for which the config was requested. This corresponds to the first and second argument to get_config.

prefix_filter

A reference to the logging-filter which was added to prefix log-lines with the config ID. This exists so a user can easily get a handle on this in case it needs to be removed from the filters.