config VS owner

Compare config vs owner and see what are their differences.

config

configuration library for JVM languages using HOCON files (by lightbend)

owner

Get rid of the boilerplate code in properties based configuration. (by lviggiano)
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config owner
32 1
6,082 905
0.4% -
4.5 7.7
5 months ago 10 days ago
Java Java
Apache License 2.0 BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

config

Posts with mentions or reviews of config. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-20.
  • XML is better than YAML
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
    I don‘t understand why HOCON (https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md) isn‘t used more often (at least for configuration use cases). It‘s a superset of JSON, has comments, multiline strings, optional quotes, replacement syntax. We use it at many places, and it‘s as nice at it can get.
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
    This is one of the few HN discussions where I feel a little bit qualified to give an opinion :)

    Two years ago I started a small data quality checker software where users could define their alerts, frequencies,.. all in config files instead of modifying code.

    I started with JSON as config format, but then realised comments are necessary to guide users in defining alerts. I moved to YAML, but after some "indentation incodents" started using HOCON conf [0] and never looked back. I don't see any reason for choosing YAML over one of JSON or HOCON, except being forced to. Features such as inheritance and text block support which were essential for me are nicely supported in HOCON.

    [0] https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md

  • Toml-bench – Which toml package to use in Python?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Sep 2023
  • slf4j or System.Logger?
    5 projects | /r/java | 6 Jul 2023
  • TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2023
  • Ron: Rusty Object Notation
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2023
    HOCON is a great human-readable alternative to JSON. It's a superset of JSON with lots of cool features that make it both more readable and easier to use.

    Here's a rundown of HOCON's main features: https://github.com/lightbend/config#features-of-hocon

  • Spring and scala
    4 projects | /r/scala | 13 Mar 2023
    For reading configuration files, I would probably use this: https://github.com/lightbend/config instead of Spring.
    4 projects | /r/scala | 13 Mar 2023
    "Typesafe Config" is the library generally used to read configuration files in HOCON format, which this library introduced. It's commonly used in essentially OOP/imperative Scala contexts, including Akka and its ecosystem.
  • Make systemd better for Podman with Quadlet
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2023
    Interesting!

    For my own servers I use an internal tool that integrates apps with systemd. You point it at the output of your build system and a config file, and it produces a deb that contains systemd unit files and which registers/starts the server on install/reboot/upgrade, as a regular debian package would. Then it uploads it to the server via sftp and installs it using apt, so dependencies are resolved. As part of the build process it can download and bundle language runtimes (I use it with a JVM), it scans native binaries to find packages that the app should depend on, and you can define your config including package metadata like dependencies and systemd units using the HOCON language [1].

    Upshot is you can go from a Gradle or Maven build to a running server with a few lines of config. Oh and it can build debs from any OS, so you can push from macOS and Windows too. If your server needs to depend on e.g. Postgres, you just add that dependency in your config and it'll be up and running after the push.

    It also has features to turn on DynamicUser and other sandboxing features. I think I'll experiment with socket activation next, and then bundled BorgBackup.

    Net/net it's pretty nice. I haven't tried with containers because many language ecosystems don't seem to really need them for many use cases. If your build tool knows how to download your language runtime and bundle it sans container by just setting up paths correctly, then going without means you can rely on your Linux distribution to keep things up to date with security patches in the background, it means networking works as you'd expect (no accidentally opened firewall ports!) and so on. SystemD knows how to configure resource isolation/cgroups and kernel sandboxing, so if you need those you can just write that into your build config and it's done. Or not, as you wish.

    With a deployment tool to automate builds/pushes, systemd to supervise processes and a big beefy dedicated machine to let you scale up, I wonder how much value the container part is really still providing if you don't need the full functionality of Kubernetes.

    [1] https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md

  • Introducing JXC: An extensible, expressive data language. It's a drop-in replacement for JSON and supports type annotations, numeric suffixes, base64 strings, and more!
    11 projects | /r/programming | 20 Feb 2023
    Other similar standards: TOML, HOCON

owner

Posts with mentions or reviews of owner. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-06-14.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing config and owner you can also consider the following projects:

cfg4j - Modern configuration library for distributed apps written in Java.

dotenv - Loads environment variables from .env for nodejs projects.

dotenv - A twelve-factor configuration (12factor.net/config) library for Java 8+

Configur8 - Nano-library which provides the ability to define typesafe (!) configuration templates for applications.

centraldogma - Highly-available version-controlled service configuration repository based on Git, ZooKeeper and HTTP/2

KAConf - KickAss Configuration. An annotation-based configuration system for Java and Kotlin

json5 - JSON5 — JSON for Humans

gura - Gura configuration language