Live

A modular configuration framework with live reloading, atomic updates, and format-agnostic loading.

live provides a complete solution for managing application configuration in Rust. It integrates atomic storage, flexible loaders, and filesystem monitoring into a unified controller, enabling applications to react to configuration changes in real-time without restarts.

Features

• Atomic Storage: Thread-safe configuration store (Store) using RCU semantics for wait-free reads and consistent updates.
• Live Reloading: Built-in filesystem monitoring (Watcher) that automatically detects changes and triggers reloads.
• Format Agnostic: Support for multiple formats (JSON, TOML, YAML, Postcard) with automatic detection and extension.
• Secure Loading: FileSource with sandbox protection against path traversal attacks.
• Unified Controller: The Live<T> controller ties everything together, providing a simple API for loading, accessing, and watching configurations. Controllers are thread-safe and cloneable, sharing resources efficiently.
• Directory Scanning: The LiveDir<T> controller manages multiple configurations from a directory, with pattern-based key extraction (e.g., [443] → "443") and support for compound extensions (e.g., .config.json).
• Lifecycle Management:
  • Validation: Integration with validator to ensure config validity before update.
  • Preprocessing: Hooks for data normalization or context injection.
  • Debouncing: Intelligent event coalescing to prevent redundant reloads.
  • Safe Cleanup: Automatic and shared resource management; watchers are only stopped when the last controller instance is dropped.

Usage Examples

Check the examples directory for runnable code:

• Basic Usage: examples/basic.rs - Demonstrates how to setup a Live controller, load a configuration, and watch for file changes.
• Directory Scanning: examples/live_dir.rs - Demonstrates LiveDir for managing multiple configurations from a directory with pattern-based key extraction.

Installation

[dependencies]
live = { version = "0.3", features = ["full"] }

Feature Flags

Feature	Description
holder	Enables the atomic storage module (re-exports atomhold).
loader	Enables the configuration loading module (re-exports fmtstruct).
signal	Enables the filesystem monitoring module (re-exports fsig).
controller	Enables the Live and LiveDir controllers (requires holder + loader + fs).
events	Enables event broadcasting for Store.
fs	Enables FileSource for loading from filesystem.
json	Enables JSON format support.
toml	Enables TOML format support.
yaml	Enables YAML format support.
postcard	Enables Postcard (binary) format support.
validate	Enables validator integration.
regex	Enables regex validation (requires validate).
match	Enables glob pattern matching for Watcher.
stream	Enables Stream API for Watcher.
full	Enables all features above.

License

Released under the MIT License © 2026 Canmi