Running SQLAlchemy scripts off of pylon's paste configurations

I've come across a situation where I want to be able to use cron to launch scripts that automate some tasks (fetch info from 3rd party, scramble their data into my database format, write to my database). I want to be able to use the models I've already created in SQLAlchemy, along with the configuration of SQLAlchemy in my paste configuration files (development.ini, production.ini) in these scripts.

I don't need all of the bells and whistles of pylons, just the SQLAlchemy stuff. Luckily, there are some convenience functions that seem to have been made to deal with a situation just like this one. Here's the code:

import sys 
from paste.deploy import appconfig
from sqlalchemy import engine_from_config
from myapp.model import init_model

def setup_environment():
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print 'Usage: Need to specify config file.'
        sys.exit(1)

    config_filename = sys.argv[1]
    config = appconfig('config:%s' % config_filename, relative_to='.')
    engine = engine_from_config(config)
    init_model(engine)

Of course, replace "myapp" with the name of your application.

Getting the configuration filename from the command-line arguments could of course be put somewhere else, so I'll just skip talking about that. The two main functions are appconfig and engine_from_config.

appconfig is from paste.deploy, which reads the configuration file and returns a dictionary-like object. engine_from_config is from SQLAlchemy and takes a dictionary-like object, retrieves SQLAlchemy-specific configurations, and uses the configurations to create an engine object.