YAML config file is not loaded in dyanconf settings

Question

Here is my project structure:

project/
   src/
      settings.py
   examples/
      example-config.yaml

# settings.py
OUTPUT_DIR = "generated"

# example-config.yaml
OUTPUT_DIR: "custom_dir"

According to the docs settings.py gets automatically loaded. Therefore the code below works:

from dynaconf import settings
print(settings.OUTPUT_DIR) # prints -> generated

However when trying to load the example-config.yaml, nothing changes. See below:

from dynaconf import settings
settings.load_file("../examples/example-config.yaml")
print(settings.OUTPUT_DIR) # prints -> generated. expected -> custom_dir

Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

You should explicitly set the root directory for the import, I was facing a similar problem where the configuration file was not found, and dynaconf silently suppressed all errors.

For older Dynaconf you can set the ROOT_PATH_FOR_DYNACONF environment variable to the base path of the project.

For Dynaconf version > 3, the recommendation is to make an instance of Dynaconf yourself. You should set the root_path there.

config.py file:

from dynaconf import Dynaconf

settings = Dynaconf(root_path="/path/to/project")

Then you can use the relative import.

from project.config import settings

settings.load_file("examples/example-config.yaml")