ConfigLib

This library facilitates creating, saving and loading YAML configuration files. It does so by using Reflection on configuration classes and automatically saving and loading their field names and values, creating the configuration file and its parent directories if necessary.

Features

• automatic creation, saving and loading of YAML configurations
• automatic creation of parent directories
• option to add explanatory comments by adding annotations to the class or its fields
• option to exclude fields by making them final, static or transient
• option to change the style of the configuration file
• option to version configuration files and change the way updates are applied

General information

What can be serialized?

You can add fields to your configuration class whose type is one of the following:

• a simple type, which are all primitive types (e.g. boolean, int), their wrapper types (e.g. Boolean, Integer) and strings
• Lists, Sets and Maps of simple types (e.g List<Double>) or other lists, sets and maps (e.g. List<List<Map<String, Integer>>>)
• custom types which have a no-argument constructor
• ConfigLists, ConfigSets and ConfigMaps of custom types

If you want to use lists, sets or maps containing objects of custom types, you have to use ConfigList, ConfigSet or ConfigMap, respectively. If you don't use these special classes for storing custom objects, the stored objects won't be properly (de-)serialized.

Default and null values

All reference type fields of a configuration class must be assigned non-null default values. If any value is null, (de-)serialization will fail with a NullPointerException.

Serialization of custom classes

You can add fields to your configuration class whose type is some custom class. @Comments added to custom classes or their fields are ignored and won't be displayed in the configuration file.

How-to

You can find a step-by-step tutorial here: Tutorial

Creating a configuration

To create a new configuration, create a class which extends Configuration. Fields which are not final, static or transient and whose type is one of the above can automatically be saved to the corresponding configuration file.

Saving and loading a configuration

Instances of your configuration class have a load, save and loadAndSave method:

• load updates all fields of an instance with the values read from the configuration file.
• save dumps all field names and values to a configuration file. If the file exists, it is overridden; otherwise, it is created.
• loadAndSave first calls load and then save, which is useful when you have added or removed fields from the class or you simply don't know if the configuration file exists.

Adding and removing fields

In order to add or to remove fields, you just need to add them to or remove them from your configuration class. The changes are saved to the configuration file the next time save or loadAndSave is called.

Post load action

You can override postLoadHook to execute some action after the configuration has successfully been loaded.

Comments

By using the @Comment annotation, you can add comments to your configuration file. The annotation can be applied to classes or fields. Each String of the passed array is written into a new line.

Versioning

Use the @Version annotation to enable versioning. Versioning lets you change the way how configuration files are updated when a version change is detected.

Custom configuration style

You can change the style of the configuration file by overriding the protected create... methods of your configuration class. Overriding these methods effectively changes the behavior of the underlying Yaml parser. Note that if one these methods returns null, a NullPointerException will be thrown.

For more information, consult the official documentation.

Examples

Step-by-step tutorial: Tutorial

Example of a custom class

public class Credentials {
    private String username = "minecraft";
    private String password = "secret";
}

Example database configuration

import de.exlll.configlib.Comment;
import de.exlll.configlib.Configuration;
/* other imports */

@Comment({
        "This is a multiline comment.",
        "It describes what the configuration is about."
})
@Version(version = "1.2.3")
public final class DatabaseConfig extends Configuration {
    /* ignored fields */
    private final String ignored1 = "";     // ignored because final
    private static String ignored2 = "";    // ignored because static
    private transient String ignored3 = ""; // ignored because transient
    /* included fields */
    private String host = "localhost";
    private int port = 3306;
    @Comment("This is a single-line comment.")
    private List<String> strings = Arrays.asList("root", "local");
    @Comment({
            "This is a multiline comment.",
            "It describes what this field does."
    })
    private Map<String, List<String>> listByStrings = new HashMap<>();
    private Credentials credentials = new Credentials();

    public DatabaseConfig(Path configPath) {
        super(configPath);
    }
    /* other methods */
}

Example Bukkit plugin

public class ExamplePlugin extends JavaPlugin {
    @Override
    public void onEnable() {
        Path configPath = new File(getDataFolder(), "config.yml").toPath();

        DatabaseConfig config = new DatabaseConfig(configPath);
        try {
            config.loadAndSave();
            System.out.println(config.getPort());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            /* do something with exception */
        }
    }
}

Import

Maven

<repository>
    <id>de.exlll</id>
    <url>https://repo.exlll.de/artifactory/releases/</url>
</repository>

<!-- for Bukkit plugins -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>de.exlll</groupId>
    <artifactId>configlib-bukkit</artifactId>
    <version>1.4.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- for Bungee plugins -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>de.exlll</groupId>
    <artifactId>configlib-bungee</artifactId>
    <version>1.4.0</version>
</dependency>

Gradle

repositories {
    maven {
        url 'https://repo.exlll.de/artifactory/releases/'
    }
}
dependencies {
    // for Bukkit plugins
    compile group: 'de.exlll', name: 'configlib-bukkit', version: '1.4.0'

    // for Bungee plugins
    compile group: 'de.exlll', name: 'configlib-bungee', version: '1.4.0'
}

Additionally, you either have to import the Bukkit or BungeeCord API or disable transitive lookups. This project uses both of these APIs, so if you need an example of how to import them with Gradle, take a look at the build.gradle.

If, for some reason, you have SSL errors that you're unable to resolve, you can use http://exlll.de:8081/artifactory/releases/ as the repository instead.