Gallery-dl portable configuration

[the-nothingman]

According to this closed bug report gallery-dl has the ability to to use a config file that is within the same directory as the program for a portable version but there's no documentation on how to do this. When I try it keeps ignoring the gallery-dl.conf, is there something specific this needs to work or does this not work with the gallery-dl.exe as is.

[Hrxn]

I haven't tried it, but a gallery-dl.conf in the same directory as the exefile should work.
Did you make sure that there are no hidden file extensions or something?

[rautamiekka]

Can't say for sure but when I read the config.py code, there's no check for the config file where the binary is, so you can "bypass" that with:

--config config.json

, but it doesn't check for the file where the binary is, only the folder where your shell/terminal is currently; cd C:\Program Files while the binary is C:\Users\Public\gallery.exe fails without C:\Program Files\config.json.

But if you use drag-dropping, then it can be done like this (only by using a .bat):

--config "%~dp0config.json"

Notice that there's no \ cuz %~dp0 implicitly adds one, so config.json is the file.

^ Here's a Bash equivalent (Linux/WSL/etc.), and pretty sure it doesn't need a script file:

--config "$(dirname -- "${0}")/config.json"

[mikf]

You might also want to prevent the cache file being written to %APPDATA%\gallery-dl\cache.sqlite3 by default. -o cache.file= would disable it completely (see cache.file).

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when I read the config.py code, there's no check for the config file where the binary is
it doesn't check for the file where the binary is, only the folder where your shell/terminal is currently

It only checks in the same folder where the binary is:

gallery-dl/gallery_dl/config.py

Lines 41 to 46 in 6651da2

	if getattr(sys, "frozen", False):
	# look for config file in PyInstaller executable directory (#682)
	_default_configs.append(os.path.join(
	os.path.dirname(sys.executable),
	"gallery-dl.conf",
	))

[the-nothingman]

In the end I just deleted the old file and made a new one from scratch and it started working as intended. I have no idea what the bug was so I'm closing the issue.

[the-nothingman]

I just figured out what was going wrong, for anyone checking out this in the future @rautamiekka is correct the binary doesn't check the folder it is in for the config file.

If for example you do what I did and you add a folder to PATH and place all the gallery-dl files within it and use right click open command line (not in that specific folder) then gallery-dl will ignore any config files. If you want to use the gallery-dl.conf in the same folder you have to open your terminal specifically in that folder