We use a system that combines several of the existing answers on this page, plus draws on this suggestion by Scott Hanselman.
In short, what we did was to have a common app.config / web.config, and to have most of the specific settings in individual files, as suggested by other answers here. e.g. for our SMTP settings, the app.config contains
<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp configSource="configsmtp.config" />
</mailSettings>
</system.net>
This file is in source control. However, the individual files, like this, are not:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
<network host="127.0.0.1" port="25" defaultCredentials="false" password="" userName ="" />
</smtp>
That's not quite where the story ends though. What about new developers, or a fresh source installation? The bulk of the configuration is no longer in source control, and it's a pain to manually build all of the .config files they need. I prefer to have source that will at least compile right out of the box.
Therefore we do keep a version of the .config files in source control, named .config.default files. A fresh source tree therefore looks like this:
Still, not really any use to the developer, since to Visual Studio they're just meaningless text files. Hence the batch file, copy_default_config.bat
, takes care of creating an initial set of .config files from the .config.default files:
@echo off
@REM Makes copies of all .default files without the .default extension, only if it doesn't already exist. Does the same recursively through all child folders.
for /r %%f in (*.default) do (
if not exist "%%~pnf" (echo Copying %%~pnf.default to %%~pnf & copy "%%f" "%%~pnf" /y)
)
echo Done.
The script is safely re-runnable, in that developers who already have their .config files will not have them overwritten. Therefore, one could conceivably run this batch file as a pre-build event. The values in the .default files may not be exactly correct for a new install, but they're a reasonable starting point.
Ultimately what each developer ends up with is a folder of config files that looks something like this:
It may seem a little convoluted, but it's definitely preferable to the hassle of developers stepping on each other's toes.