Literate configuration

Welcome! In this booklet I will introduce you to Literate Configuration, which is the application of Literate Programming to configuration files. If you are already familiar with Literate Programming you might find most of the basic concepts familiar. Literate Programming is a beautiful concept, but it is ambitious and hard to apply in general software development. However, I have found that it can be especially applicable to configuration files, for several reasons:

• Configuration files are inherently focused, since they correspond to a single application, program or set of programs, all related. This makes it easier to draw a narrative for them;
• Most configuration files are self-contained but their structure and syntax may not be immediately evident, so they benefit from a human-readable explanation of their contents;
• Configuration files are often shared and read by others, as we all like to learn by reading the config files of other people. Applying Literate Programming to config files makes them much easier to share, since their explanation is naturally woven into the code;
• Org mode has emerged in the last few years as a powerful and simple markup language for general writing, but with unique features that make it easy to include code within the text, and even further, to easily extract that code into stand-alone source files which can be interpreted by their corresponding programs.

Whether you already use Emacs and Org or not, I hope you will find value in this book by seeing how uniquely Literate Programming can help you better write, maintain, understand and share your config files.