I am looking for a C or C++ open-source library for exposing configuration-related variable via an API and a web UI. The requirements are:
R1. It should be non-intrusive for the programmer. Assume an existing code has a global variable const bool show_fps = false
(i.e., a debugging relic), a programmer should be able to write something like:
bool show_fps = true; // only "const" is removed
CONFIG(&show_fps, // variable
"debug.show_fps", // API identifier
"Show FPS", // short user-friendly title
"Enable/disable displaying the number of frames per second of the video pipeline", // long user-friendly description
);
R2. It should expose an API (e.g., REST, line-oriented) which allows:
- to list configuration variables, their user-friendly title and their description;
- to determine their current value;
- to set the value of a variable.
R3. It should expose a single-page web UI which present the above API in a user-friendly manner.
Since, I got the question previously: I know that C and C++ are not the same thing, however, I believe that writing an adapter from one language to another implies a lot less effort that writing a library fulfilling the above requirements from scratch. Hence, I am open to both C and C++ libraries.
Below are some examples of libraries and frameworks I came across during my research and why they fall short:
Boost
program_options
fits R1 quite nicely:int opt; po::options_description desc("Allowed options"); desc.add_options() ("optimization", po::value<int>(&opt)->default_value(10), "optimization level") ;
However, it seems to be geared towards the command-line, environment variables and configuration files, hence not fulfilling R2 and R3.
I drew a lot of inspiration from the Linux kernel's
moduleparam.h
header:static int max_loop; module_param(max_loop, int, 0444); MODULE_PARM_DESC(max_loop, "Maximum number of loop devices");
It fits requirement R1 quite well. R2 is almost fulfilled, i.e., said configuration can be manipulated via sysfs, however, an API that is not kernel-specific is required. R3 is not fulfilled.
etcd is an excellent server-software for storing key-value configuration variables organized as a tree, partially fulfilling R2 and R3. However, it does not have a notion of user-friendly title and description for each variable. Furthermore, I found no library to integrate with it non-intrusively (R1).