Composing Configuration Files

spock supports hierarchical composition of configuration files with a simple syntax.

Composing Two YAML Files

Going back to our example. Let's say we had a a portion of our configuration that does not change that often while another portion changes frequently or are parameters that are being experimented with. For instance, let's say we have finalized things related to our data set (although in our examples it is random... let's just imagine for now) but we are still experimenting with our neural network parameters.

Instead of maintaining multiple copies of configuration files where parameters related to the data set are not changing, we can compose two separate configuration files together. One static file related to the data set parameters and a more dynamic file that is changing. This separation helps keep errors from propagating into the static set of data set related parameters.

For instance we can break our tutorial.yaml file into two.

First, let's split out the static data related parameters into: data.yaml

################# data.yaml################# DataConfigbatch_size: 2n_samples: 8DataConfig:  cache_path: /home/user/cache/

And then in our second configuration file we can use the config: key to define the other configuration files we want to compose into this configuration file: changing.yaml

################# changing.yaml################# Globalcache_path: /tmp/cache/config: [/data.yaml]# Special Keysave_path: /tmp# ModelConfign_features: 64dropout: [0.2, 0.1]hidden_sizes: [32, 32, 16]activation: reluoptimizer: SGD# OptimizerConfiglr: 0.01n_epochs: 2grad_clip: 5.0# SGD Configweight_decay: 1E-5momentum: 0.9nesterov: true

Warning

You can add as many configuration files as you want to a config tag however be aware of circular dependencies (this should get caught and raise an exception) and that the lower a configuration file is in the order (i.e. later in the list) that it will take precedence over the others.