The .coafile Specification¶
This document gives a short introduction into the specification of a coala configuration file. It is meant to be rather factual, if you wish to learn by example, please take a look at the coala Tutorial.
Naming, Scope and Location¶
You can use up to three coafiles to configure your project.
- A project-wide coafile.
- A user-wide coafile.
- A system-wide coafile.
Project-Wide coafile¶
It is a convention that the project-wide coafile is named .coafile
and lies in the project root directory. If you follow this convention,
simply executing coala
from the project root will execute the
configuration specified in that file.
Settings given in the project-wide coafile override all settings given by other files and can only be overridden by settings given via the command line interface.
User-Wide and System-Wide coafile¶
You can place a .coarc
file in your home directory to set certain
settings user wide. Those settings will automatically be taken for all
projects executed with that user.
All settings specified here override only settings given by the system
wide coafile which has the lowest priority. The default_coafile
must
lie in the coala installation directory and is valid for everyone using
this coala installation
Setting Inheritance¶
Every coafile consists out of one or more sections. Section names are
case insensitive. The default
section is implicitly available and
all settings which have no section specified belong to it. The
default
section is special because all settings residing in it are
automatically inherited to all other sections specified in the same
coafile.
This is an example coafile:
enabled = True
overridable = 2
[section-1]
overridable = 3
other = 4
[section-2]
overridable = 5
other = 2
This coafile would be interpreted the very same as this one, written a bit more explicitly:
[default]
enabled = True
overridable = 2
[section-1]
enabled = True
overridable = 3
other = 4
[section-2]
enabled = True
overridable = 5
other = 2
Comments, Escaping and Multiline Values and Keys¶
Comments are simply done with a preceding #
. If you want to use a
#
within a value, you can simply escape it:
a_key = a\#value # And a comment at the end!
Any line not containing an unescaped =
is simply appended to the
value of the last key:
a_key = a
value
# this is not part of the value
that /= is
very long!
Similarly, you can also set a value to multiple keys:
key_1, key_2 = value
is equivalent to key_1 = value
and
key_2 = value
in separate lines.
As the backslash is the escape character it is recommended to use forward slashes as path seperator even on windows (to keep relative paths platform independent), use double-backslashes if you really mean a backslash in all places.