# oslo.config Quick Start!

Are you brand new to oslo.config? This brief tutorial will get you started understanding some of the fundamentals.

## Prerequisites

- A plain text editor or Python-enabled IDE

- A Python interpreter

- A command shell from which the interpreter can be invoked

- The oslo_config library in your Python path.

## Test Script

Put this in a file called `oslocfgtest.py`.

    # The sys module lets you get at the command line arguments.
    import sys

    # Load up the cfg module, which contains all the classes and methods
    # you'll need.
    from oslo_config import cfg

    # Define an option group
    grp = cfg.OptGroup('mygroup')

    # Define a couple of options
    opts = [cfg.StrOpt('option1'),
            cfg.IntOpt('option2', default=42)]

    # Register your config group
    cfg.CONF.register_group(grp)

    # Register your options within the config group
    cfg.CONF.register_opts(opts, group=grp)

    # Process command line arguments.  The arguments tell CONF where to
    # find your config file, which it loads and parses to populate itself.
    cfg.CONF(sys.argv[1:])

    # Now you can access the values from the config file as
    # CONF.<group>.<opt>
    print("The value of option1 is %s" % cfg.CONF.mygroup.option1)
    print("The value of option2 is %d" % cfg.CONF.mygroup.option2)

## Conf File

Put this in a file called `oslocfgtest.conf` in the same directory as `oslocfgtest.py`.

    [mygroup]
    option1 = foo
    # Comment out option2 to test the default value
    # option2 = 123

## Run It!

From your command shell, in the same directory as your script and conf, invoke:

    python oslocfgtest.py --config-file oslocfgtest.conf

Revel in the output being exactly as expected. If you’ve done everything right, you should see:

    The value of option1 is foo
    The value of option2 is 42

Now go play with some more advanced option settings!

this page last updated: 2026-01-28 20:28:15

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