[PLUG-Devel] SVN and conf files

[Carl Parrish]

Craig White wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 01:47 -0700, der.hans wrote:
>> moin moin,
>>
>> at work we have a code base that has everything hard-coded. Major suckage.
>> I'm working on fixing it.
>>
>> We also have recently moved to Subversion, which is good.
>>
>> We now have dev and prod environments. We might someday get to use the
>> stage environment as well. The configuration we need to use in each
>> environment differs somewhat. I'd like to keep the configuration files in
>> SVN as well since the basic format stays the same, just some of the values
>> are different.
>>
>> Any suggestions on a good way to keep the base structure the same and yet
>> have slightly different values?
>>
>> I could throw the config files in branches and use softlinks to put them
>> in place. I fear this would lead to the config files getting out of sync.
>>
>> I could tokenize the things that change and build the config files in each
>> environment from a skeleton that's in SVN. Twould be good to have a
>> trigger hit the build mechanism every time a config skeleton changes. Yes,
>> require specific OK for the trigger in prod :).
>>
>> I could come up with a config file format that allows scripting and then
>> just use programming structure to determine the proper config for the
>> machine. Yuck.
>>
>> I could add a config stanza for each machine in the config files and then
>> use the hostname or environmental variables to figure out which stanza to
>> use. I guess this would be OK, but again I think it leads to configs
>> getting out of sync.
>>
>> I could just get a job at a company that understands and values config
>> files :). I'd still need a solution to this dilema, though.
>>
>> Oh, BTW, I need to add config files to shell scripts, PHP scripts, Perl
>> scripts, Java programs and I'm not sure what language a couple of the
>> tools are written in, but probably one of those.
>>
>> Some of the scripts get config info from XML files.
>>
>> A couple get configs from XML files that override the configs written in
>> other XML files.
>>
>> Thankfully our diverse array of Oracle environments were all homogenized,
>> well except the one in dev disappeared again today...
>>
>> Our MySQL environments are, um, varied. They copy data back and forth and
>> are all, in some way or another, different.
>>
>> Mostly, the DB issues are handled by the configs for the tools, but I
>> thought I'd mention them in case anybody had any gotchas they wanted to
>> bring to my attention.
>>
>> happy happy config config,
> ----
> the way that I have been handling this with rubyonrails is config files
> themselves are excluded from svn (actually ignored)
> 
> for example...
> rails_root/config/database.yml is ignored
> rails_root/config/database.yml.office is committed normally
> rails_root/config/database.yml.home is committed normally
> and I just copy and likewise ignore...
> rails_root/config/database.yml.one_of_them
> rails_root/config/database.yml
> 
> Craig
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG-devel mailing list  -  PLUG-devel at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-devel
> 
> 
This is the same thing we do. The repos has a skeleton of the config
file. Once we have it in an environment (dev, testing, stage,
production) we fill in the config settings then set svn ignore.