How do you deal with configuration files in source control?

Question

Let\'s say you have a typical web app and with a file configuration.whatever. Every developer working on the project will have one version for their dev boxes, there will be

Answer 1

For a long time, I have done exactly what bcwood has done. I keep copies of web.dev.config, web.test.config, web.prod.config, etc. under source control, and then my build/deploy system renames them automatically as it deploys to various environments. You get a certain amount of redundancy between the files (especially with all of the asp.net stuff in there), but generally it works really well. You also have to make sure that everyone on the team remembers to update all the files when they make a change.

By the way, I like to keep ".config" at the end as the extension so that file associations do not get broken.

As far as local developer versions of the config file, I always try my best to encourage people to use the same local settings as much as possible so that there is no need to have your own version. It doesn't always work for everyone, in which case people usually just replace it locally as needed and go from there. It's not too painful or anything.