Configuring Fathom

All configuration in Fathom is optional. If you supply no configuration values then Fathom will default to using a SQLite database in the current working directory.

If you're already running MySQL or PostgreSQL on the server you're installing Fathom on, you'll most likely want to use one of those as your database driver.

To do so, either create a .env file in the working directory of your Fathom application or point Fathom to your configuration file by specifying the --config flag when starting Fathom.

fathom --config=/home/john/fathom.env server

The default configuration looks like this:

FATHOM_GZIP=true
FATHOM_DEBUG=true
FATHOM_DATABASE_DRIVER="sqlite3"
FATHOM_DATABASE_NAME="./fathom.db"
FATHOM_DATABASE_USER=""
FATHOM_DATABASE_PASSWORD=""
FATHOM_DATABASE_HOST=""
FATHOM_DATABASE_SSLMODE=""
FATHOM_SECRET="random-secret-string"

Accepted values & defaults

Name	Default	Description
FATHOM_DEBUG	false	If true will write more log messages.
FATHOM_SERVER_ADDR	:8080	The server address to listen on
FATHOM_GZIP	false	if true will HTTP content gzipped
FATHOM_DATABASE_DRIVER	sqlite3	The database driver to use: mysql, postgres or sqlite3
FATHOM_DATABASE_NAME		The name of the database to connect to (or path to database file if using sqlite3)
FATHOM_DATABASE_USER		Database connection user
FATHOM_DATABASE_PASSWORD		Database connection password
FATHOM_DATABASE_HOST		Database connection host
FATHOM_DATABASE_SSLMODE		For a list of valid values, look here for Postgres and here for MySQL
FATHOM_DATABASE_URL		Can be used to specify the connection string for your database, as an alternative to the previous 5 settings.
FATHOM_SECRET		Random string, used for signing session cookies

Common issues

Fathom panics when trying to connect to Postgres: pq: SSL is not enabled on the server

This usually means that you're running Postgres without SSL enabled. Set the FATHOM_DATABASE_SSLMODE config option to remedy this.

FATHOM_DATABASE_SSLMODE=disable

Using FATHOM_DATABASE_URL

When using FATHOM_DATABASE_URL to manually specify your database connection string, there are a few important things to consider.

• When using MySQL, include ?parseTime=true&loc=Local in your DSN.
• When using SQLite, include ?_loc=auto in your DSN.

Examples of valid values:

FATHOM_DATABASE_DRIVER=mysql
FATHOM_DATABASE_URL=root:@tcp/fathom1?loc=Local&parseTime=true