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Comment by ayroblu | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this, what's the problem here? Having config files in root means you know they can apply to all sub directories. This has nice properties like recursive behaviours (see .gitignore)

If you want to put (most of) your config files in a .config folder, then most apps should support that

If you want to view your config files in a different way, then actually you're trying to solve a different problem. Perhaps hide show toggling or automatic grouping (see macOS desktop stacks) with your fs viewer would be a better area to tackle.

Finally, just wanted to say, everything at root level is usually config or a folder, so if I want to understand what tooling a project uses, I know immediately where to go, code is always in a "src" or similar. It sounds like this is a feature, not a bug.

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Yeah, I take a cluttered root dir over having to hunt down files I may not know exist in various places in order to fully understand a project I’m not the maintainer of.

Gets me every time when a maintainer puts Dockerfile in some random subdirectory.

If the root dir is full of dozens of files from all the tooling needed to build your software, maybe you have another problem than directory structure...

The same argument is made for not adhering to the XDG spec for user configuration files. The result is you have no real sense of specific locations for config files, shared static data, and app-generated data. If an app follows the spec you know exactly where to look. Otherwise it’s anyone’s guess.

I’ll admit this is less of a problem in project dirs, since tooling usually confines itself to a single file. But tooling outputs often similarly pollute. For example, I wish Python dumped its artifacts in a single directory I could delete, instead of in every source subdir.

> The same argument is made for not adhering to the XDG spec for user configuration files

I think it's a fundamental difference in that the project repo should be self-contained and "owned", whereas arbitrary software I run really shouldn't be putting files in my home directory.

In a software repo, anything inside it belongs to the project.

I think there are similarities -- the project's root is the project's, so why does eg the Travis CI system get to insist on having a config file sat in the project root?

Where should it go?

Just like the gitlab-ci.yml, it handles things related to the whole repo, it basically runs a script in the root of the repo anyway.

Sure, supporting other paths is useful (eg. in case of a monorepo), but this default seems sane. Though I'm interested in where others move it, and why.

it's pretty common to have a .ci folder for your build scripts.

But nothing is fundamentally wrong either with XDG-esque directory structures.

.config/travis/

.ci/travis/

all the same to me, as long as it's consistent.

> the project's root is the project's, so why does eg the Travis CI system get to insist on having a config file sat in the project root?

Because it defines the project's CICI pipeline? Aka how the project is built, tested, delivered, and deployed?

I mean, that's a more fundament part of the project than which files should be automatically ignored when committing stuff to git (i.e., .gitignore)

With 3.8 python has PYthoncacheprefix where you can specify where the pyc files end up. Makes life so much better with docker

Do you know about the pyclean tool?

Since switching to git, I'm increasingly of the mind that clean) belongs to the source control (`git clean') rather than the build. After all, the source control knows what files belong to a bare checkout of the project and which have shown up since you got your grubby little paws on the code!

git clean has options to only clean ignored files, which generally does what you want. I could see there being weird situations where a file is .PRECIOUS (in make's terms) or where you have a file that's ignored but not a product of the build (a developer-specific config file?) where this doesn't work, but I haven't run into that yet, and it's freeing to not have to maintain a free target by hand.

Exactly... the problem isn't the proliferation of config files, it's the use of so many tools that require those config files

So are you advising developers to use less tools, or maybe all-in-one toolsets? Presumably tools are used to support tasks that were otherwise more onerous and time-consuming and maybe neglected because of that.

>So are you advising developers to use less tools, or maybe all-in-one toolsets?

No, you're the only one arriving at that conclusion.

The whole point is that if you're going to adopt tooling then you'll need to configure them all, and that's fine with config files in the project root tree.

How about an all in one config file?

You have a standard JSON config file “.config.json” that resides in the root folder with a global object, with each key containing the config for each tool.

Collisions might be a concern, but you could use the tool’s url as the key so it’s unique. You are already seeing runtimes like Deno and Go do that for importing source code. Couldn’t the same thing apply for this config file as well?

I'm pretty sure that I've read an aphorism along the lines that every configuration over time develops into an ad hoc programming language (similar to Greenspun's 10th rule so maybe I am just misremembering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)

At any rate the closest I could find to this saying was this HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092967 "Configuration files suck. Just use a programming language"

>but you could use the tool’s url as the key so it’s unique.

reminds me of XML namespaces.

on edit: formatting

That's how I configure my projects using dhall.

I'm working on a web application at the moment with a REST API, database, rabbitMQ, a few python workers, nginx, 2 react projects and a Gatsby project plus some docker composes for testing.

Everything is configured in the root file and then this is imported into smaller dhall files in the subprojects. In the build scripts I generate all the yaml and JSON from these, even the docker-composes and it's very ergonomic.

First I'm hearing of this tool and it seems really nice. Do you perhaps have an open repo that shows how you are using the dhall files? If I can reduce my config files to dhall + justfile I'd be quite happy.

> How about an all in one config file?

What an awful idea. I don't even know where to start enumerating the problems that this approach creates, and what for? I mean, just think about it. Have you ever had to comb through a config file to add support for something but while you were not sure what option dictated which and what impact this or that option had because documentation is ineffective or awful or even non-existent?

Now multiply that complexity by all the options added by all the tools expected to use a file, compounded by the fact that God knows how many tools also write to that file and may or may not stay in their lane when doing so.

Who in the hell wants to deal with that mess?

And what for? Just because someone wants to adopt a tool but has a problem with having to configure its own config file?

Not so sure if it "must" be _one_ config file.

I also don't think that the format matters more than it's use.

Reminds me of some good advice in The Pragmatic Programmer, should be (simple) text-files for editing and (regardless if one or multiple files), a single source of truth (e.g. if multiple files, not the same time the same data to edit in). This is roughly as I remember it and I found it always useful to apply.

If I see duplication, it's about fighting the rot and remove it.

If configuration files are generated, they don't belong under version control (there are some exclusions to this rule, e.g. pinning dependency versions for example when shared with the repository).

Yes, less tools. Perhaps by making better use of existing tools

I’ve never had a problem using find and grep -R

Likewise here. I think that as far as defaults go, having these config files accessible in project root so makes it easy for people to see what tooling a project uses.

Suppose this pushes through and .config becomes more of a default than a conscious project choice. I don't see all tooling packages to follow-through immediately with it - causing a period where you still have the scourge of some config files in project root, while others are at .config.

That's syntax war, the least useful aspect of programming with strong opinion from every party. And next time there would be "why every language has different config folder?".

I totally agree with this except - just when I was done with reading this thread I went back to the project I was on and I noticed there was some file in the root of the project red in VSCode so I go look at it, it's a JSConfig.json wtf is that I don't remember that config.

It says

{ "compilerOptions": { "baseUrl": "./" }, "exclude": [ "node_modules" ] }

I go google what it is, seems to be some VSCode thing added automatically maybe? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/jsconfig

but VSCode thinks it should be marked red, something is wrong with this config file I have no familiarity with. grrr.

anyway - I think at some point, especially on projects with lots of devs and lots of tooling, you look at the root and like art you know what you like or don't like and sometimes there will be a feeling that there are just too many files here for configuring stuff! But probably that indicates some other underlying problem, not a problem with having config files in itself.

Yeah - I think that's a cue pointing to you that your understanding of the project at hand may be lacking in some regard. I usually listen to that signal and learn the heck out of the current tooling whose config I see on the root before proceeding with the subdirectories.

That feeling of mild anxiety in not knowing why these files are there can be useful, is all I'm saying.

yeah or it's a cue that someone using VSCode created a JSConfig.json checked it in and it got pulled by the latest git pull.

> I don't get this, what's the problem here? Having config files in root means you know they can apply to all sub directories.

This makes sense for configs that could ostensibly do this, but that's only a fraction of them. Regardless of what we do about those (if anything), the other ones at least shouldn't be laid out like this.

... “shouldn’t be laid out like this” doesn’t explain why it’s a _problem_ though. I’m curious about this as well. I think it’s fine as is.

Same reason why we have subdirectories in the first place and don't just shove everything into one directory. Same reason why you (hopefully) don't put everything on your desk and instead designate places for things, like in drawers. Same reason why we have a ~/.config folder now instead of just shoving everything into ~/ like we used to.

There is no One True Place, would you like drawers with my preferences and no way to override?

The list of configuration files/directories is known. Why can't those who bother present them as they desire? Instead of forcing their will on others.

There reason for ~/.config is separation from data and cache. And the reason behind XDG Base Directory Specification is a generic way to run application with another config `XDG_DATA_HOME=foo bar`.

> Same reason why we have a ~/.config folder now instead of just shoving everything into ~/ like we used to.

Who/what is the "we" here? Last I checked my homefolder was still chock full of dotfiles in-use.

Now, half of them are in ~/.config This is better because it means you have to look in more places.

Similarly, things also like to hide state in ~/.cache

If they didn’t then rm -rf .appname would restore it to default settings, and we can’t have that.

I notice you chose to exclusively point out the negative aspects.

https://xkcd.com/927/

So copy them in there after you clone it?

This is the sort of issue that leads to “this page intentionally blank” type use of resources.

“When everything is a hammer...” when all you have to work with is a file system it always looks messy.

I’m more interested in making sure the right values exist in memory for runtime use.

Source, config, and comments could all live in one file and be specially delimited for look up too.

It’s all arbitrary at that point. This is really focusing on the wrong issues in computing.

I think it's the varying degrees of importance and surprise factor.

One dotfile has the maintainer's eccentric syntax highlighting preferences, another has critical build system settings needed to make any use of the code. Which ones do I really need to knand which are just conveniences for users of a particular IDE?

There are very few pieces of information where, to me, the natural place to look for it is "a dotfile at the root of the project." gitignore is an exception here.

A voice of reason

I agree it wouldn't make sense to put the configs on a global folder like $HOME/.config but I don't see what would be the problem of putting them on a .config folder at the root of the project directory.

Recursive behavior would still work, the same way that Git can recognize that there is a ".git" directory in one of the ancestor directories.

With .config folder at root of project then paths in configs are ../whatever/ instead of whatever/ and ../ is evil plus having ../ on front of every path is noisy.

Good point, never had a problem to place the configuration files where they belong to, be it in the project root or not, until I figured it out. That's what software configuration management is for, and SCM is obviously in place (given this is a reported issue on Github).

And if you allow me to build on the "Finally" note in your comment with a personal note:

Some _human readable_ content belongs into the root as well, e.g. a read-me, information under which conditions the code can be used (copying info) and similar, the important stuff. Otherwise it would mean it only needs to be machine read-able (which can be fine, too, especially for pure configuration management, still though a repository will most likely checked out by a human from time to time).

Uncle Bob raises this question from time to time: When you checkout a repository and look into the tree, what do you see?

The root is always an opportunity to show the projects' birds-view.

I disagree with regards to _human readable_ content. We put "README"'s in the project root because it's configuration for most git repo viewer's e.g. GitHub. If GitHub didn't have this auto nice formatting, I probably wouldn't add it, preferring a docs dir (for the general case). Licenses is awkward, it's kinda config too really

Yes, that's why humans can read it on Github. Many people put even ASCII art into it (and restrain from actual HTML tags despite those are just fine in Markdown). So actually no disagreement from my side on that one, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.

Oh what a reminiscence to back then when exchanging software on floppy disks, and when the !readme.txt not written in your language, you found the "link" to the file in your "docs" folder often at the very top.

Or you just found the docs folder, in case no readme there.

Btw., this works on Github, too. The docs folder is normally directly visible above the fold while the read-me might not, especially when there is a long list of files which OP put on topic.

The problem is someone anthropomorphized their code as “suffering” as justification to debate the color of the bike shed.

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