Config

Didact's apps, namely, the CLI, the Engine, and the UI, are all build once, deploy anywhere applications whose behaviors are modified through a central configuration file. This configuration file can be thought of as a set of app settings and runtime environment variables for Didact's apps.

Config file

To provide important environment variables and app settings for Didact CLI, you need a didact.config.json file. This is similar to an appsettings.json or .env file that you would find in a standard dotnet project. All three of Didact's apps use the config file, so it's very important that you initialize it and configure any necessary settings.

INFO

Originally, I was going to have a separate config file for each individual Didact app, but I later decided that was too tedious. I would rather provide one, simple, unified config file that you can easily reuse, initialize, or pass around however you need to.

When initialized, the config file is created in Didact CLI's default installation folder for easy access.

Config commands

To create didact.config.json, use the config init command. This command will also create and activate a default config profile for you.

To populate or edit a specific setting in didact.config.json, use the config set command.

To see the current values inside didact.config.json, use the config inspect command.

Config profiles

Considering that Didact is a self-hosted tool, it is very possible that you may be targeting various environments in your infrastructure that require different settings, different secrets, different connection strings, and so on.

Rather than have you constantly resetting configuration settings in didact.config.json, managing multiple didact.config.json files, or doing some other hack, I have elected to instead provide config profile support.

Config profiles are uniquely named objects in a dictionary object where each profile contains the actual Didact settings. You can create multiple config profiles and save different settings to each profile. Then, in the config file, you elect to activate one config profile at a time.

TIP

It's important to keep in mind, then, that config settings are actually saved specifically to config profiles.

This is very convenient for you because you can easily create different profiles and easily swap back and forth between their settings. For example, you could make a staging profile for your Staging environment and a production profile for your Production environment.

To create a new config profile, run the config profile init command.

To activate an existing profile, run the config profile activate command.

Config contexts

In the case that you want to use special contextual data in the config file, Didact exposes a reserved config context syntax that you can use in the config file.

For example, you may want to access the machine name for the engine name, or you may want to use a database connection string that is saved as an environment variable on the machine. In both of these cases and more, you can access this data using config contexts.

DANGER

The config context strings must be typed exactly as displayed below, so I provided copyable codeboxes below to help you avoid accidental typos in your config. If you're manipulating your config file via a script, then just make sure you keep the spelling and spacing exactly as shown below.

The available config contexts are listed below:

• ${machineName} The machine name.

${machineName}

• ${username} The current username.

${username}

• ${env.SOME_VARIABLE} The environment variable named SOME_VARIABLE.

${env.SOME_VARIABLE}

• ${variables.some-variable} The Didact variable named some-variable.

${variables.some-variable}

• ${secrets.some-variable} The Didact secret named some-variable.

${secrets.some-variable}

Config template

A didact.config.json JSON template file is shown below with the default config profile:

{
    "$schema": "https://schemas.didact.dev/v1/didact.config.json",
    "activeProfile": "default",
    "profiles": {
        "default": {
            "Database": {
                "Provider": "<DB_PROVIDER_KEY>",
                "ConnectionString": "<DB_CONNECTION_STRING>"
            },
            "EncryptionKey": "<ENCRYPTION_KEY>",
            "LicenseKey": "<LICENSE_KEY>",
            "Engine": {
                "Name": "<ENGINE_NAME>"
            },
            "UI": {
                "EngineBaseUrl": "<BASE_URL>"
            }
        }
    }
}

Config settings

The config settings for a profile are shown below:

INFO

For simplicity, when referencing these settings through Didact CLI commands, use the exact JSON key reference here such as Database.Provider.

Setting	Type	Description
activeProfile	string	The currently activated config profile.
Database.Provider	string	The database provider key for your database provider of choice.
Database.ConnectionString	string	The connection string for the database.
EncryptionKey	string	The symmetric encryption key.
LicenseKey	string	An API key from Didact Console that unlocks enhanced features.
Engine.Name	string	The name of the Didact Engine instance.
UI.EngineBaseUrl	string	The base URL of a target Didact Engine.

LicenseKey

INFO

A license key is only required for Didact customers who purchase a subscription. Free users who use the Community edition of Didact can ignore this field.