Version: 0.11

Defaults

After office politics, you decide that you want to use MySQL by default. You no longer want to type db=mysql every time you run your application.

You can add a defaults list into your config file.

Config group defaults

Configuration file: config.yaml

defaults:
  - db: mysql

Remember to specify config.yaml as the config_path.

@hydra.main(config_path='conf/config.yaml')
def my_app(cfg):
    print(OmegaConf.to_yaml(cfg))

When you run the updated application, MySQL is loaded by default.

$ python my_app.py
db:
  driver: mysql
  pass: secret
  user: omry

You can still load PostgreSQL, and override individual values.

$ python my_app.py db=postgresql db.timeout=20
db:
  driver: postgresql
  pass: drowssap
  timeout: 20
  user: postgres_user

You can prevent a default from being loaded by assigning null to it in the command line:

$ python my_app.py db=null
{}

Sometimes a config file you want to merge does not belong in any config group. The following will load some_file.yaml from your config directory:

defaults:
  - some_file

Config files that not a part of a config group like db cannot be overridden.