config.md

Overview

There are 2 ways to manage Actionhero configuration: configuration files and overrides. In both cases, Actionhero starts by reading the config in ./config/. Here is what config files for a new Actionhero project look like.

The normal way to deal with configuration changes is to use the files in /config/ and to have changed options for each environment, based on NODE_ENV. First we load in all settings from the default config block, and then we replace those with anything defined in the relevant environment section. Actionhero uses the standard node environment variable NODE_ENV to determine environment, and defaults to ‘development' when one isn't found. This pattern is very similar the Rails and Sails frameworks. A good way to visualize this is to note that, by default, the server will return metadata in response JSON, but we change that in the production NODE_ENV and disable it.

export const DEFAULT = {
  general: config => {
    return {
      //...
      developmentMode: true
      //...
    };
  }
};

export const production = {
  general: config => {
    return {
      developmentMode: false
    };
  }
};

The priority order of configs is:

1. options passed in to boot with actionhero.start({configChanges: configChanges})
2. environment-specific values in /config
3. default values in /config

When building config files of your own, note that an exports.default is always required, and any environment overrides are optional. What is exported is a hash which eventually resolves a synchronous function which accepts the api variable.

Boot Options to find the Config Directory

When launching Actionhero you can specify which config directory to use with --config '/path/to/dir' or the environment variable ACTIONHERO_CONFIG, otherwise ./config/ will be used from your working directory.

The priority of arguments is:

1. Use the project's ./config folder, if it exists.
2. actionhero --config=PATH1 --config=PATH2 --config=PATH3,PATH4
3. ACTIONHERO_CONFIG=PATH1,PATH2 npm start

Note that if --config or ACTIONHERO_CONFIG are used, they overwrite the use of the default /config folder. If you wish to use both, you need to re-specify "config", e.g. --config=config,local-config. Also, note that specifying multiple --config options on the command line does exactly the same thing as using one parameter with comma separators, however the environment variable method only supports the comma-delimited syntax.