Provide custom chepy.conf location about chepy

[securisec]

@geekscrapy You can provide a custom location for the plugins already. Just specify your custom location in pluginpath in the chepy.conf file. By default, it will try to use its own plugins which are packed with the latest repos. You can see those here. If you place your own plugins in that folder, Chepy will load them. If not, and you specific your own directory, then it will load only what it finds in that directory.

As for the location of the conf file itself, because there are various ways of installing chepy, it is not a super good idea to have it look in the current location. If someone uses pip to install chepy, then the current location becomes the site-packets/chepy dir which becomes cumbersome for the user to update. As for use cases of a cwd location for the conf file, it does assume that the user will set a valid conf file, which the average user might fail too. So having a standard good known config file and location follows the pattern of most popular tools out there.

Thanks for the issues.

[geekscrapy]

The issue I have with not having the cwd as a valid conf is this; chepy is part of my tool, I distribute my tool and I need to be able to set the plug-in directory to a directory in my tools "plugin" dir. This way I can distribute my own plugins with my own tool. Without this I have to get people to manually mod the chepy conf (which they shouldn't have to do, as chepy is only used in my tool internally, therefore people wont know to even change the plugin path!). If it's a library it needs to be portable, without the end user having to customise their setup for a lib, which is part of the bigger tool. I will say, there are also lots of other tools that will look in the following places to find the conf (usually in this order):
$cwd
$home
/etc
Hope that makes sense! 😅

[securisec]

Ah, i understand your use case. I will consider building that out. As an alternative, if you are distributing it as a tool, you can modify this line. Set home = Path().resolve().

Hope this solution helps in the meanwhile till next release!

[geekscrapy]

So you know, I'm currently doing this to get round the limitation as I cannot distribute and modify the package as you suggest above (as chepy needs to be installed from pip -r requirements.txt):

from pathlib import Path
bin_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
def custom_Chepy():
    import chepy
    conf = chepy.ChepyConfig()
    conf.plugin_path = Path(os.path.join(bin_path,'plugins'))
    _plugins = conf.load_plugins()
    class Chepy(
        chepy.AritmeticLogic,
        chepy.CodeTidy,
        chepy.Compression,
        chepy.DataFormat,
        chepy.DateTime,
        chepy.EncryptionEncoding,
        chepy.Extractors,
        chepy.Forensics,
        chepy.Hashing,
        chepy.Language,
        chepy.Multimedia,
        chepy.Networking,
        chepy.Other,
        chepy.Publickey,
        chepy.Search,
        chepy.Utils,
        *_plugins
    ):
        pass

    return Chepy

[securisec]

Ah glad you have it working. Not sure why my suggested method didn't work, but happy it is working for you now. I am still keeping it in mind your feature request for next version. Out of curiosity, what kind of plugins are you developing for chepy? I am always very open to ideas that can enhance chepy itself.

[geekscrapy]

It would be file based plugins - renaming files, moving etc. Things that you can't normally do with a browser. So I'd be looking for more of those types of plugins in the future. FYI, the main reason I was looking at using chepy over the CyberChefAPI in node was because node takes a while to load it's imports, which is a killer for cli tool...

To be honest, I didn't try your method as it would mean I have to modify chepy code where-ever I want to run my tool, so it wasn't really an option.

[securisec]

@geekscrapy I just release version 2.1.3 which implements your requested feature. It will now look at $CWD for a .chepy folder where the configs are. You can refer to docs for more config objects. So if you distribute your package with a .chepy folder, then you can specify your own chepy.conf file with the proper keys to enable and set plugin paths. If you just supply an empty .chepy dir in cwd, then it will create the default conf files at first run.

[geekscrapy]

Just an FYI, even though the .chepy dir is loaded from the CWD, the plugin_path is still required to be an absolute path which means the original issue exists.