web.config and app.config machine-specific settings in git

Question

We have multiple teams of developers in different offices, and they need different values for a number of configuration setting in our projects\' web.config and

Answer 1

We ran into a similar dilemma at our company. We ended up creating separate configuration branches which supplement the main branch. Like for example - develop-config, master-config, etc. We then have a small script which will rebase those branches with the correct source branch based on the deployment environment. So for example on the development machine we would rebase develop-config with develop. If you are working on local machine, you would get the default configuration (agreed upon by all developers) which is checked into the main branch (like the local DB name, password, etc). Of course the downside is that you always have to keep those *-config branches up-to-date or get them upto speed at the time of deployment.

Since implementing this workflow, I've come across couple of deployment tools out there like whiskey_disk which take a somewhat similar approach. In fact I like their solution a lot more since its much more secure and flexible. Although probably not a good fit for you guys since its geared more towards a LAMP/RoR development stack.

Aside from that, there are also some commercial solutions out there that you might want to take a look at like Beanstalk