Config::Fast is an extremely fast configuration file parser.

SYNOPSIS

# default config format is a space-separated file
company "Supercool, Inc."
support nobody@nowhere.com


# and then in Perl
use Config::Fast;

%cf = fastconfig;

print "Thanks for visiting $cf{company}!n";
print "Please contact $cf{support} for support.n";

This module is designed to provide an extremely lightweight way to parse moderately complex configuration files. As such, it exports a single function - fastconfig() - and does not provide any OO access methods. Still, it is fairly full-featured.

Heres how it works:

%cf = fastconfig($file, $delim);

Basically, the fastconfig() function returns a hash of keys and values based on the directives in your configuration file. By default, directives and values are separated by whitespace in the config file, but this can be easily changed with the delimiter argument (see below).

When the configuration file is read, its modification time is first checked and the results cached. On each call to fastconfig(), if the config file has been changed, then the file is reread. Otherwise, the cached results are returned automatically. This makes this module great for mod_perl modules and scripts, one of the primary reasons I wrote it. Simply include this at the top of your script or inside of your constructor function:

my %cf = fastconfig(/path/to/config/file.conf);

If the file argument is omitted, then fastconfig() looks for a file named $0.conf in the ../etc directory relative to the executable. For example, if you ran:

/usr/local/bin/myapp

Then fastconfig() will automatically look for:

/usr/local/etc/myapp.conf

This is great if youre really lazy and always in a hurry, like I am.

If this doesnt work for you, simply supply a filename manually. Note that filename generation does not work in mod_perl, so youll need to supply a filename manually.