Templates do not resolve recursively

[dolfandringa]

I am trying to create a template for my config file using confuse but have trouble understanding how this works. Unfortunately I can't find much about it in the docs.
I am have the following sample in MyApp.py:

import confuse

template = {"api": {"token_file": confuse.templates.Filename()}}

config = confuse.Configuration("MyApp")
config.get(template)
print(config["api"]["token_file"])
print(config["api"].get(template["api"])["token_file"])
print(config["api"]["token_file"].as_filename())

If I then put the following in ~/.config/MyApp/config.yaml

api:
    token_file: ./my_token.pickle

This is the output of MyApp.py:

./my_token.pickle
/home/me/.config/MyApp/my_token.pickle
/home/me/.config/MyApp/my_token.pickle

As you can see the first print statement doesn't actually resolve the filename, even though the template specifies it as a filename, but the second and third version do resolve it correctly. Since I want my application to be ignorant wrt confuse, I just want it to use config['api']['token_file'] without having to worry about the templates. So is there a way to have confuse recursively resolve the template types when I call config.get(template), so the first print statement also resolves as I was expecting?

[sampsyo]

I think the main thing to realize is that the line config.get(template) isn't doing anything—it doesn't change anything about the configuration. get is really just a getter and won't affect further calls.

You can do config.get(template)['api']['token_file'] and that should do what you expect, equivalent to config["api"]["token_file"].as_filename(). So to directly answer your question, you can store the result of config.get(template), which is just a normal, completely standard Python dict-of-dicts data structure and use that.