Quickstart

cihai is designed to work out-of-the-box without configuration.

Installation

$ pip install --user cihai

Configuration

By default, cihai requires no configuration. The defaults file locations are XDG Base Directory for the users’ system, as well as SQLite to store, seek, and retrieve data.

You can override cihai’s default storage and file directories via a config file.

The default configuration is at cihai.constants.DEFAULT_CONFIG.

Database configuration accepts any SQLAlchemy Database URLs. If you’re using a DB other than SQLite, such as Postgres, be sure to install the requisite driver, such as psycopg.

Advanced Config

cihai is designed to allow you to incrementally override settings to your liking.

Internally, the config is parsed through cihai.conf.expand_config(). This will replace environment variables, XDG variables and tildes. You can also enter absolute paths.

Environmental variables require a dollar sign added to them, e.g. ${ENVVAR}. XDG variables such as user_cache_dir, user_config_dir, user_data_dir, user_log_dir, site_config_dir, site_data_dir are done via curly brackets only. E.g. {site_config_dir}. Tildes are just replaced.

database:
  url: '${DATABASE_URL}'
dirs:
  data: '{user_data_dir}/mydata'
  cache: '~/cache/cihai'
  logs: '$ENVVAR/logs'

In the example above, Heroku’s DATABASE_URL is replaced as an environmental variable. The XDG variable for user_data_dir is combined with mydata/, which makes the data stored deeper. The environmental variable $ENVVAR is also replaced.

You may point to a custom config with the -c argument, $ cihai -c path/to/config.yaml.

You can also override bootstrapping settings. The “unihan_options” dictionary in Cihai’s configuration will be passed right to unihan-etl ·’s unihan_etl.core.Packager option param, which is then merged on top of unihan-etl’s default settings:

unihan_options:
   source: 'https://custom-mirror.com/Unihan.zip'  # local paths work too
   work_dir: '/path/to/unzip/files'
   zip_path: '/path/to/store/Unihan.zip'
   fields: ['kDefinition']  # and / or:
   input_files: ['Unihan_Readings.txt']