Add tests around the loading of settings

Minor refactors, but mostly adding tests to drive out a bug I
encountered while trying to query the settings from the frontend.
Merge pull request #166 from Dparker1990/add_tests_to_config

Add tests around the loading of settings
Ignore UnmarshalJSON in python api generation
Merge pull request #170 from Dparker1990/ignore_unmarshalJSON_in_python_api

Ignore UnmarshalJSON in python api generation