Ubuntu Manpage: README

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Provided by: elektra-doc_0.8.14-5.1ubuntu2_all

NAME

README_mdlibelektra
- Elektra provides a universal and secure framework to store configuration parameters in a global,
hierarchical key database.

The core is a small library implemented in C. The plugin-based framework fulfills many configuration-
related tasks to avoid any unnecessary code duplication across applications while it still allows the
core to stay without any external dependency. Elektra abstracts from cross-platform-related issues with
an consistent API, and allows applications to be aware of other applications' configurations, leveraging
easy application integration.

Why should I use Elektra?

Contact
Do not hesitate to ask any question on github issue tracker, Mailing List or directly to one of the
authors.

Quickstart
If you want to use Elektra for your application, read the application integration tutorial.

Installation
The preferred way to install Elektra is by using packages provided for your distribution. On
Debian/Ubuntu, this can be done by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install elektra-bin libelektra-dev

This will install the Elektra tools as well as everything needed to develop with Elektra.

If you're not running Debian/Ubuntu, check out the package list, download elektra directly or compile it
yourself.

It is preferable to use a recent version: They contain many bug fixes and additional features. See
INSTALL for other ways to install Elektra.

Usage
Now that we have Elektra installed, we can start using the kdb command and the qt-gui.

You can use the kdb command to configure your applications:

kdb set user/env/override/HTTP_PROXY "http://my.proxy:8080"

This will set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable to http://my.proxy:8080. Configuration can be retrieved
with kdb get:

kdb get /env/override/HTTP_PROXY

For information about elektrified environment variables, see src/libgetenv/README.md

Documentation
To get an idea of Elektra, you can take a look at the presentation.

The full documentation, including tutorials, glossary, and concepts and man pages is available in the
github repository.

You can read the documentation for the kdb tool, either

• http://libelektra.org/blob/master/doc/help/kdb.md 'on github'

• in the API docu

• by using kdb --help or kdb help <command>

• by using man kdb

Goals
• Make it trivial for applications and administrators to access any configuration

• Postpone some decisions from programmers to

• Make configuration storage more safe: avoid that applications receive wrong or unexpected values that
could lead to undefined behaviour.

• Allow software to be better integrated on configuration level maintainers/administrators, e.g. which
syntax and the location of configuration files.

• Reduce rank growth of configuration parsers in our ecosystem, but foster well maintained plugins
instead.

And in terms of quality, we want:

1. Simplicity (make configuration tasks simple),

2. Robustness (no undefined behaviour of applications), and

3. Extensibility (gain control over configuration access)