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# Notes on the IPython configuration system

This document has some random notes on the configuration system.

To start, an IPython process needs:

- Configuration files
- Command line options
- Additional files (FURL files, extra scripts, etc.)

It feeds these things into the core logic of the process, and as output, produces:

- Log files
- Security files

There are a number of things that complicate this:

- A process may need to be started on a different host that doesn’t have any of the config files or additional files. Those files need to be moved over and put in a staging area. The process then needs to be told about them.
- The location of the output files should somehow be set by config files or command line options.
- Our config files are very hierarchical, but command line options are flat, making it difficult to relate command line options to config files.
- Some processes (like ipcluster and the daemons) have to manage the input and output files for multiple different subprocesses, each possibly on a different host. Ahhhh!
- Our configurations are not singletons. A given user will likely have many different configurations for different clusters.

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