Manage configuration files across environments

Question

How do you (your company) manage the config-files of the apps/systems you build? Let me tell you how we do it, and what the problem is.

I\'m working at a company where w

Answer 1

Take a look at Config at http://www.configapp.com. The way it will work is you will import a base configuration file called web.config. Then from within the webapp, you will create 4 environments, dev, test, acc and prod. Go to the dev environment, create your environment variables, and set the values appropriate to the environment. You will be maintaining just one configuration file with environment variables. You can see all the environment variables, and easily view the differences between the environments.

You will make less mistakes because you only have 1 configuration file to manage. When you add a new common/static configuration, all environments will magically have that new setting. When you add a variable configuration, just go the correct environment tab and set the value there. You can view a specific configuration value for all environments so it's a quick way to check if you missed something. You can also eyeball each configuration file per environment, since they are all right in front of you. You don't need to RDP/SSH to each server.

You won't forget to check in since Config will be the master copy, and you won't edit configuration files directly anymore. If you do edit them directly, we have a diff functionality so you can see the differences between the master and the local copy. You can deploy the master copy to your local server using various deployment models that suits your team. You can push, manual pull, auto pull or export/copy.

We will support custom types, and one thing we can add in the future is a port data type. Part of port validation would be checking if the port is open. This will only work using the on-premises plan since it needs access to the internal network. Or you can just check it manually. Go to the port environment variable, and display all the ports currently configured. Check each port in the list. If the port looks good, add a comment in Config that it's open and it was checked on a certain date. Config is designed for searching and documentation.

I'm part of the Config team, by the way.