Managing Environment Specific Config Files?

byrnereese asks: "It seems that every organization I have worked for has been plagued with the same problem: 'how do you effectively manage multiple environment configurations for the various development, staging and production environments that exist.' For example, each application at our company requires a different set of database credentials for each environment we deploy it to. For a long time we have maintained different config files for each environment and checked them into our SCCS; but that has proved incredibly error prone because a different build is required for each environment. Each company I have worked for utilizes a different systemology to make config file management a little easier, but none of them have stumbled upon anything that is any less error prone, or any easier to manage than any other solution to choose from. So I am curious, how does your company manage environment specific application configuration? And what does your change management process for these configurations look like?"

Comments

LDAP / SCM?

[Aniquel]

Just a thought, but isn't LDAP designed for information kinda like this? Not the actual config information, but pointers to the correct config file? You could put the config files themselves into an SCM system, and then when a box needs to find out what config file it should be using it queries the ldap server for what file it should hit. Offers atomic updates, scalability. hmm... might try that here.