Why is it a bad idea to write configuration data in code?

Question

Real-life case (from caff) to exemplify the short question subject:

$CONFIG{\'owner\'} = q{Peter Palfrader};
$CONFIG{\'email\'} = q{peter@palfrader.org};
$CO         


        

Answer 1

Excuse the long code listing. Below is a handy Conf.pm module that I have used in many systems which allows you to specify different variables for different production, staging and dev environments. Then I build my programs to either accept the environment parameters on the command line, or I store this file outside of the source control tree so that never gets over written.

The AUTOLOAD provides automatic methods for variable retrieval.

# Instructions:
# use Conf;
# my $c = Conf->new("production");
# print $c->root_dir;
# print $c->log_dir;

package Conf;
use strict;
our $AUTOLOAD;

my $default_environment = "production";

my @valid_environments  = qw(
    development
    production
);

#######################################################################################
# You might need to change this.
sub set_vars {
    my ($self) = @_;

    $self->{"access_token"} = 'asdafsifhefh';

    if ( $self->env eq "development" ) {
       $self->{"root_dir"}       = "/Users/patrickcollins/Documents/workspace/SysG_perl";
       $self->{"server_base"}    = "http://localhost:3000";
    }

    elsif ($self->env eq "production" ) {
       $self->{"root_dir"}       = "/mnt/SysG-production/current/lib";
       $self->{"server_base"}    = "http://api.SysG.com";
       $self->{"log_dir"}        = "/mnt/SysG-production/current/log"
    }  else {
            die "No environment defined\n";
    }

    #######################################################################################
    # You shouldn't need to configure this.

    # More dirs. Move these into the dev/prod sections if they're different per env.
    my $r = $self->{'root_dir'};
    my $b = $self->{'server_base'};

    $self->{"working_dir"} ||= "$r/working";
    $self->{"bin_dir"}     ||= "$r/bin";
    $self->{"log_dir"}     ||= "$r/log";

    # Other URLs. Move these into the dev/prod sections if they're different per env.

    $self->{"new_contract_url"}   = "$b/SysG-training-center/v1/contract/new";
    $self->{"new_documents_url"}  = "$b/SysG-training-center/v1/documents/new";

}

#######################################################################################
# Code, don't change below here.

sub new {
    my ($class,$env) = @_;
    my $self = {};
    bless ($self,$class);

    if ($env) {
            $self->env($env);
    } else {
            $self->env($default_environment);
    }

    $self->set_vars;
    return $self;
}

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my ($self,$val) = @_;
    my $type = ref ($self) || die "$self is not an object";
    my $field = $AUTOLOAD;

    $field =~ s/.*://;

    #print "field: $field\n";

    unless (exists $self->{$field} || $field =~ /DESTROY/ )
    {
       die "ERROR: {$field} does not exist in object/class $type\n";
    }

    $self->{$field} = $val if ($val);
    return $self->{$field};

}

sub env {
    my ($self,$in) = @_;
    if ($in) {
            die ("Invalid environment $in") unless (grep($in,@valid_environments));
            $self->{"_env"} = $in;
    }
    return $self->{"_env"};
}

1;