Introspection Functionalities

Config Utilities Introspection is primarily a debugging and information tool, that will log detailed information about all get/set and related events happening when loading your configuration. This detailed information will be saved to file and can be rendered to analyze the configuration progress for your app.

Getting Introspection data

To enable the logging of introspection data, run your app that uses config_utilities with the --config-utilities-introspection or -i argument. By default, introspection output will be written to ./config_introspection_results and stored in a file called data.json. Optionally, a different target target directory can be specified using -i /my/output/path.

This works automatically when calling config::initContext(argc, argv) in your main file, which is requried to parse the command line arguments. Alternatively, the introspection can be enabled by setting the config::Settings().introspection.output field to a directory before running any other parsing. In this case, the output data will be written to the specified output drectory.

✅ Supports
When -i is set anywhere in the input arguments, all steps of loading and changing of configs will automatically be covered in the introspection. This is the recommended mode of usage.

⚠️ Important
Currently introspection only captures events via the Global Context (see Parse via global context). This is the preferred method to configure your app. Introspection results for other forms of parsing may be supported in the future.

Visualize the results

To interactively visualize the results, we provide the config-utilities-viewer tool. After running your app with -i option, you can run config-utilities-viewer from the same terminal to inspect the results. If running in the same directory, it will automatically look for the default introspection output. Otherwise, use the --data /my/output/path/data.json arg to read the correct introspection output. Your browser should automatically open with the viewer, otherwise navigate to to host:port (default is https://localhost:5000) to see the output.