When it comes to configuration files and parsing them, you have a lot of options, from simple to complicated.

We could, of course, simply store what we want in JSON, but that format is a little tricky to work directly for humans—it will require escaping characters and so on, which makes it vulnerable to errors.

Instead, we'll keep things simple by using a standard ini config file library in gcfg, which handles gitconfig files and traditional, old school .ini format, as shown in the following code snippet:

[revisions]
count = 2
revisionsuffix = .rev
lockfiles = false

[logs]
rotatelength = 86400

[alarms]
emails = [email protected],[email protected]

Essentially, this library takes the values of a config file and pushes them into a struct in Go. An example of how we'll do that is as follows:

package main

import
(
  "fmt"
  "code.google.com/p/gcfg"
)

type Configuration struct {
  Revisions struct {
    Count int
    Revisionsuffix string
    Lockfiles bool
  }
  Logs struct {
    Rotatelength int
  }
  Alarms struct {
    Emails string
  }
}

func main() {
  configFile := Configuration{}
  err := gcfg.ReadFileInto(&configFile, "example.ini")
  if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("Error",err)
  }
  fmt.Println("Rotation duration:",configFile.Logs.Rotatelength)
}