praw.ini Files¶
Async PRAW comes with a praw.ini
file in the package directory, and looks for
user defined praw.ini
files in a few other locations:
In the current working directory at the time
Reddit
is initialized.In the launching user’s config directory. This directory, if available, is detected in order as one of the following:
In the directory specified by the
XDG_CONFIG_HOME
environment variable on operating systems that define such an environment variable (some modern Linux distributions).In the directory specified by
$HOME/.config
if theHOME
environment variable is defined (Linux and Mac OS systems).In the directory specified by the
APPDATA
environment variable (Windows).
Note
To check the values of the environment variables, you can open up a terminal (Terminal/Terminal.app/Command Prompt/Powershell) and echo the variables (replacing <variable> with the name of the variable):
MacOS/Linux:
echo "$<variable>"
Windows Command Prompt
echo "%<variable>%"
Powershell
Write-Output "$env:<variable>"
You can also view environment variables in Python:
import os print(os.environ.get("<variable>", ""))
Format of praw.ini¶
praw.ini
uses the INI file format, which can contain multiple groups
of settings separated into sections. PRAW and Async PRAW refers to each section
as a site
. The default site, DEFAULT
, is provided in the package’s
praw.ini
file. This site defines the default settings for interaction with
Reddit. The contents of the package’s praw.ini
file are:
[DEFAULT]
# A boolean to indicate whether or not to check for package updates.
check_for_updates=True
# Object to kind mappings
comment_kind=t1
message_kind=t4
redditor_kind=t2
submission_kind=t3
subreddit_kind=t5
trophy_kind=t6
# The URL prefix for OAuth-related requests.
oauth_url=https://oauth.reddit.com
# The amount of seconds of ratelimit to sleep for upon encountering a specific type of 429 error.
ratelimit_seconds=5
# The URL prefix for regular requests.
reddit_url=https://www.reddit.com
# The URL prefix for short URLs.
short_url=https://redd.it
# The timeout for requests to Reddit in number of seconds
timeout=16
Warning
Avoid modifying the package’s praw.ini
file. Prefer instead to
override its values in your own praw.ini
file. You can even
override settings of the DEFAULT
site in user defined
praw.ini
files.
Defining Additional Sites¶
In addition to the DEFAULT
site, additional sites can be configured in user
defined praw.ini
files. All sites inherit settings from the DEFAULT
site and can override whichever settings desired.
Defining additional sites is a convenient way to store OAuth credentials for various accounts, or distinct OAuth applications. For example, if you have three separate bots, you might create a site for each:
[bot1]
client_id=Y4PJOclpDQy3xZ
client_secret=UkGLTe6oqsMk5nHCJTHLrwgvHpr
password=pni9ubeht4wd50gk
username=fakebot1
[bot2]
client_id=6abrJJdcIqbclb
client_secret=Kcn6Bj8CClyu4FjVO77MYlTynfj
password=mi1ky2qzpiq8s59j
username=fakebot2
[bot3]
client_id=SI8pN3DSbt0zor
client_secret=xaxkj7HNh8kwg8e5t4m6KvSrbTI
password=1guiwevlfo00esyy
username=fakebot3
Choosing a Site¶
Site selection is done via the site_name
parameter to Reddit
. For
example, to use the settings defined for bot2
as shown above, initialize
Reddit
like so:
reddit = asyncpraw.Reddit("bot2", user_agent="bot2 user agent")
Note
In the above example you can obviate passing user_agent
if you
add the setting user_agent=...
in the [bot2]
site definition.
A site can also be selected via a praw_site
environment variable. This
approach has precedence over the site_name
parameter described above.
Using Interpolation¶
By default Async PRAW doesn’t apply any interpolation on the config file but this can
be changed with the config_interpolation
parameter which can be set to
“basic” or “extended”.
This can be useful to separate the components of the user_agent
into
individual variables, for example:
[bot1]
bot_name=MyBot
bot_version=1.2.3
bot_author=MyUser
user_agent=script:%(bot_name)s:v%(bot_version)s (by u/%(bot_author)s)
This uses basic interpolation thus Reddit
need to be initialized as
follows:
reddit = asyncpraw.Reddit("bot1", config_interpolation="basic")
Then the value of reddit.config.user_agent
will be
script:MyBot:v1.2.3 (by /u/MyUser)
.
See Interpolation of values for details.
Warning
The ConfigParser instance is cached internally at the class level,
it is shared across all instances of Reddit
and once set
it’s not overridden by future invocations.