# config API

The config API gives callers a way to access Git configuration files (and files which have the same syntax). See git-config(1) for a discussion of the config file syntax.

## General Usage

Config files are parsed linearly, and each variable found is passed to a caller-provided callback function. The callback function is responsible for any actions to be taken on the config option, and is free to ignore some options. It is not uncommon for the configuration to be parsed several times during the run of a Git program, with different callbacks picking out different variables useful to themselves.

A config callback function takes three parameters:

- the name of the parsed variable. This is in canonical "flat" form: the section, subsection, and variable segments will be separated by dots, and the section and variable segments will be all lowercase. E.g., `core.ignorecase`, `diff.SomeType.textconv`.

- the value of the found variable, as a string. If the variable had no value specified, the value will be NULL (typically this means it should be interpreted as boolean true).

- a void pointer passed in by the caller of the config API; this can contain callback-specific data

A config callback should return 0 for success, or -1 if the variable could not be parsed properly.

## Basic Config Querying

Most programs will simply want to look up variables in all config files that Git knows about, using the normal precedence rules. To do this, call `git_config` with a callback function and void data pointer.

`git_config` will read all config sources in order of increasing priority. Thus a callback should typically overwrite previously-seen entries with new ones (e.g., if both the user-wide `~/.gitconfig` and repo-specific `.git/config` contain `color.ui`, the config machinery will first feed the user-wide one to the callback, and then the repo-specific one; by overwriting, the higher-priority repo-specific value is left at the end).

The `git_config_with_options` function lets the caller examine config while adjusting some of the default behavior of `git_config`. It should almost never be used by "regular" Git code that is looking up configuration variables. It is intended for advanced callers like `git-config`, which are intentionally tweaking the normal config-lookup process. It takes two extra parameters:

`filename`

  If this parameter is non-NULL, it specifies the name of a file to parse for configuration, rather than looking in the usual files. Regular `git_config` defaults to `NULL`.

`respect_includes`

  Specify whether include directives should be followed in parsed files. Regular `git_config` defaults to `1`.

There is a special version of `git_config` called `git_config_early`. This version takes an additional parameter to specify the repository config, instead of having it looked up via `git_path`. This is useful early in a Git program before the repository has been found. Unless you’re working with early setup code, you probably don’t want to use this.

## Reading Specific Files

To read a specific file in git-config format, use `git_config_from_file`. This takes the same callback and data parameters as `git_config`.

## Value Parsing Helpers

To aid in parsing string values, the config API provides callbacks with a number of helper functions, including:

`git_config_int`

  Parse the string to an integer, including unit factors. Dies on error; otherwise, returns the parsed result.

`git_config_ulong`

  Identical to `git_config_int`, but for unsigned longs.

`git_config_bool`

  Parse a string into a boolean value, respecting keywords like "true" and "false". Integer values are converted into true/false values (when they are non-zero or zero, respectively). Other values cause a die(). If parsing is successful, the return value is the result.

`git_config_bool_or_int`

  Same as `git_config_bool`, except that integers are returned as-is, and an `is_bool` flag is unset.

`git_config_maybe_bool`

  Same as `git_config_bool`, except that it returns -1 on error rather than dying.

`git_config_string`

  Allocates and copies the value string into the `dest` parameter; if no string is given, prints an error message and returns -1.

`git_config_pathname`

  Similar to `git_config_string`, but expands `~` or `~user` into the user’s home directory when found at the beginning of the path.

## Include Directives

By default, the config parser does not respect include directives. However, a caller can use the special `git_config_include` wrapper callback to support them. To do so, you simply wrap your "real" callback function and data pointer in a `struct config_include_data`, and pass the wrapper to the regular config-reading functions. For example:

    int read_file_with_include(const char *file, config_fn_t fn, void *data)
    {
            struct config_include_data inc = CONFIG_INCLUDE_INIT;
            inc.fn = fn;
            inc.data = data;
            return git_config_from_file(git_config_include, file, &inc);
    }

`git_config` respects includes automatically. The lower-level `git_config_from_file` does not.

## Writing Config Files

TODO