What's The Official Way Of Storing Settings For Python Programs?

Django uses real Python files for settings, Trac uses a .ini file, and some other pieces of software uses XML files to hold this information. Are one of these approaches blessed by

Solution 1:

Depends on the predominant intended audience.

If it is programmers who change the file anyway, just use python files like settings.py

If it is end users then, think about ini files.

Solution 2:

As many have said, there is no "offical" way. There are, however, many choices. There was a talk at PyCon this year about many of the available options.

Solution 3:

Don't know if this can be considered "official", but it is in standard library: 14.2. ConfigParser — Configuration file parser.

This is, obviously, not an universal solution, though. Just use whatever feels most appropriate to the task, without any necessary complexity (and — especially — Turing-completeness! Think about automatic or GUI configurators).

Solution 4:

I use a shelf ( http://docs.python.org/library/shelve.html ):

shelf = shelve.open(filename)
shelf["users"] = ["David", "Abraham"]
shelf.sync() # Save

Solution 5:

Just one more option, PyQt. Qt has a platform independent way of storing settings with the QSettings class. Underneath the hood, on windows it uses the registry and in linux it stores the settings in a hidden conf file. QSettings works very well and is pretty seemless.