Configuration and deployment¶
As your application grows more complex, you may find that you need to have different settings for your development environment and your production environment. You may even have multiple deployments that all need their own custom configuration.
For this purpose, Asphalt provides a command line interface that will read a YAML formatted configuration file and run the application it describes.
Running the Asphalt launcher¶
Running the launcher is very straightfoward:
asphalt run [yourconfig.yaml your-overrides.yml...] [--set path.to.key=val]
Or alternatively:
python -m asphalt run [yourconfig.yaml your-overrides.yml...] [--set path.to.key=val]
What this will do is:
read all the given configuration files, if any, starting from
yourconfig.yaml
read the command line configuration options passed with
--set
, if anymerge the configuration files’ contents and the command line configuration options into a single configuration dictionary using
merge_config()
.call
run_application()
using the configuration dictionary as keyword arguments
Writing a configuration file¶
A production-ready configuration file should contain at least the following options:
component
: a dictionary containing the class name and keyword arguments for its constructorlogging
: a dictionary to be passed tologging.config.dictConfig()
Suppose you had the following component class as your root component:
class MyRootComponent(ContainerComponent):
def __init__(self, components, data_directory: str):
super().__init__(components)
self.data_directory = data_directory
async def start(ctx):
self.add_component('mailer', backend='smtp')
self.add_component('sqlalchemy')
await super().start(ctx)
You could then write a configuration file like this:
---
max_threads: 20
component:
type: myproject:MyRootComponent
data_directory: /some/file/somewhere
components:
mailer:
host: smtp.mycompany.com
ssl: true
sqlalchemy:
url: postgresql:///mydatabase
logging:
version: 1
disable_existing_loggers: false
handlers:
console:
class: logging.StreamHandler
formatter: generic
formatters:
generic:
format: "%(asctime)s:%(levelname)s:%(name)s:%(message)s"
root:
handlers: [console]
level: INFO
In the above configuration you have three top level configuration keys: max_threads
,
component
and logging
, all of which are directly passed to
run_application()
as keyword arguments.
The component
section defines the type of the root component using the specially processed
type
option. You can either specify a setuptools entry point name (from the
asphalt.components
namespace) or a text reference like module:class
(see
resolve_reference()
for details). The rest of the keys in this section are
passed directly to the constructor of the MyRootComponent
class.
The components
section within component
is processed in a similar fashion.
Each subsection here is a component type alias and its keys and values are the constructor
arguments to the relevant component class. The per-component configuration values are merged with
those provided in the start()
method of MyRootComponent
. See the next section for a more
elaborate explanation.
With max_threads: 20
, the maximum number of threads in the event loop’s default thread pool
executor is set to 20.
The logging
configuration tree here sets up a root logger that prints all log entries of at
least INFO
level to the console. You may want to set up more granular logging in your own
configuration file. See the
Python standard library documentation for details.
Using data from environment variables and files¶
Many deployment environments (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Heroku, etc.) require applications to input configuration values and/or secrets using environment variables or external files. To support this, Asphalt extends the YAML parser with three custom tags:
!Env
: substitute with the value of an environment variable!TextFile
substitute with the contents of a (UTF-8 encoded) text file (asstr
)!BinaryFile
substitute with the contents of a file (asbytes
)
For example:
---
component:
type: myproject:MyRootComponent
param_from_environment: !Env MY_ENV_VAR
files:
- !TextFile /path/to/file.txt
- !BinaryFile /path/to/file.bin
If a file path contains spaces, you can just quote it:
---
component:
type: myproject:MyRootComponent
param_from_text_file: !TextFile "/path with spaces/to/file.txt"
Note
This does not allow you to include other YAML documents as part of the configuration, except as text/binary blobs. See the next section if this is what you want.
New in version 4.5.0.
Configuration overlays¶
Component configuration can be specified on several levels:
Hard-coded arguments to
add_component()
First configuration file argument to
asphalt run
Second configuration file argument to
asphalt run
…
Command line configuration options to
asphalt run --set
Any options you specify on each level override or augment any options given on previous levels. The command line configuration options have precedence over the configuration files. To minimize the effort required to build a working configuration file for your application, it is suggested that you pass as many of the options directly in the component initialization code and leave only deployment specific options like API keys, access credentials and such to the configuration file.
With the configuration presented in the earlier paragraphs, the mailer
component’s constructor
gets passed three keyword arguments:
backend='smtp'
host='smtp.mycompany.com'
ssl=True
The first one is provided in the root component code while the other two options come from the YAML
file. You could also override the mailer backend in the configuration file if you wanted, or at the
command line (with the configuration file saved as config.yaml
):
asphalt run config.yaml --set component.components.mailer.backend=sendmail
Note
Note that if you want a .
to be treated as part of an identifier, and not as a separator,
you need to escape it at the command line with \
. For instance, in both commands:
asphalt run config.yaml --set "logging.loggers.asphalt\.templating.level=DEBUG"
asphalt run config.yaml --set logging.loggers.asphalt\\.templating.level=DEBUG
The logging level for the asphalt.templating
logger will be set to DEBUG
.
The same effect can be achieved programmatically by supplying the override configuration to the
container component via its components
constructor argument. This is very useful when writing
tests against your application. For example, you might want to use the mock
mailer in your test
suite configuration to test that the application correctly sends out emails (and to prevent them
from actually being sent to recipients!).
There is another neat trick that lets you easily modify a specific key in the configuration. By using dotted notation in a configuration key, you can target a specific key arbitrarily deep in the configuration structure. For example, to override the logging level for the root logger in the configuration above, you could use an override configuration such as:
---
logging.root.level: DEBUG
The keys don’t need to be on the top level either, so the following has the same effect:
---
logging:
root.level: DEBUG
Defining multiple services¶
New in version 4.1.0.
Sometimes it may be more convenient to use a single configuration file for launching your
application with different configurations or entry points. To this end, the runner supports the
notion of “service definitions” in the configuration file. This is done by replacing the
component
dictionary with a services
dictionary at the top level of the configuration file
and either setting the ASPHALT_SERVICE
environment variable or by passing the --service
(or -s
) option when launching the runner. This approach provides the additional advantage of
allowing the use of YAML references, like so:
---
services:
server:
max_threads: 30
component:
type: myproject.server.ServerComponent
components:
wamp: &wamp
host: wamp.example.org
port: 8000
tls: true
auth_id: serveruser
auth_secret: serverpass
mailer:
backend: smtp
client:
component:
type: myproject.client.ClientComponent
components:
wamp:
<<: *wamp
auth_id: clientuser
auth_secret: clientpass
Each section under services
is like its own distinct top level configuration. Additionally, the
keys under each service are merged with any top level configuration, so you can, for example,
define a logging configuration there.
Now, to run the server
service, do:
asphalt run -s server config.yaml
The client
service is run in the same fashion:
asphalt run -s client config.yaml
You can also define a service with a special name, default
, which is used in case multiple
services are present and no service has been explicitly selected.
Note
The -s/--service
command line switch overrides the ASPHALT_SERVICE
environment
variable.
Performance tuning¶
Asphalt’s core code and many third part components employ a number of potentially expensive validation steps in its code. The performance hit of these checks is not a concern in development and testing, but in a production environment you will probably want to maximize the performance.
To do this, you will want to disable Python’s debugging mode by either setting the environment
variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE
to 1
or (if applicable) running Python with the -O
switch.
This has the effect of completely eliminating all assert
statements and blocks starting with
if __debug__:
from the compiled bytecode.
When you want maximum performance, you’ll also want to use the fastest available event loop
implementation. This can be done by specifying the event_loop_policy
option in the
configuration file or by using the -l
or --loop
switch. The core library has built-in
support for the uvloop event loop implementation, which should provide a nice performance boost
over the standard library implementation.