Config system is usable by itself. Separate the Config system to its own project.

Could we separate the configuration system into its own distribution?

Dancer2's config system is quite usable for a serious business application. It is straightforward and clear, and still allows different configurations for different environment type, deployments and local special cases.

In my own applications I have many services: Dancer2 webservices, TheSchwarz worker queue, daemons, and others. Also database migration scripts and others. They all use the same configuration. When starting, they use DancerLikeConfig which is a module I programmed so that I would not need to include all of Dancer2 hierarchy into the program. But it still includes a lot, especially Dancer2::Core.

It would be great to be able to use only the configuration, not the whole of Dancer2. Loading everything takes time, sometimes seconds.

Name proposals: "App-Config-Dancer2", "App-Config-Modern", "App-Config-Deployments".

My DancerLikeConfig:

package Util::Config::DancerLikeConfig;
use strict;
use warnings;

use Moo;
use Dancer2::ConfigReader;
use Dancer2::Core::Types;

with qw<
      Dancer2::Core::Role::HasConfig
      Dancer2::Core::Role::HasLocation
      Dancer2::Core::Role::HasEnvironment
>;

has config_reader => (
    is      => 'lazy',
    isa     => InstanceOf['Dancer2::ConfigReader'],
);

sub _build_config_reader { ## no critic (Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines)
    my ($self) = @_;
    my $cfgr = Dancer2::ConfigReader->new(
        environment    => $self->environment,
        location       => $ENV{DANCER_CONFDIR}     || $self->location,
        # default_config => $self->_build_default_config(),
        default_config => {},
    );
    return $cfgr;
}

has '+config' => (
    is      => 'lazy',
    isa     => HashRef,
);

sub _build_config { ## no critic (Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines)
    my ($self) = @_;

    my $config_reader = $self->config_reader;
    my $config = $config_reader->config;

   return $config;
}

1;

Start by tracing Dancer2::ConfigReader and the Dancer2::Core roles used by Util::Config::DancerLikeConfig. Identify the dependencies that prevent the configuration system from standing alone and define the distribution boundary. Done means the configuration functionality can be used by other applications without loading the whole Dancer2 framework.