Best Practices

A collection of useful design tips & best practices for using traitlets in your application or library.

Avoid using “pure config” objects

Put your traitlets config directly on the classes that are doing the work, rather than creating separate classes just for holding configuration. This keeps configuration close to the code it is configuring, and helps with discoverability as well.

So instead of:

class SpawnerConfig(LoggingConfigurable):
    some_config = Unicode("", config=True)

    some_other_config = Unicode("default", config=True)


class Spawner:
    def spawn(self, config: SpawnerConfig):
        print(config.some_config)
        # Do things with config

Prefer:

class Spawner(LoggingConfigurable):
    some_config = Unicode("", config=True)

    some_other_config = Unicode("default", config=True)

    def spawn(self):
        print(self.some_config)