We will look at two approaches for changing the configuration of the website in each environment – transform the web.config file just before deploying the website, and apply the settings directly in Azure. Let us take an example of deploying an application to an Azure website.
What does configuration and app settings transforms look like in Visual Studio Team Services? The concept of managing configuration and app settings for multiple environments in your continuous deployment seems straightforward enough, but how does it look in practice? It’s likely simpler than you’d expect. Team Services provides a rich permissions model for who can manage and use secrets at each scope.īy automating the process of transforming configurations through a deployment tool, you’ll be able to count on the transforms always happening during a deployment and setting the appropriate values.
Ms access runtime config file set update settings code#
When you have connection strings, passwords, or any other settings stored in plaintext in a settings file (such as a web.config file), anyone who has access to the code can potentially access a database or machine. The values for settings are siloed out per environment so it would be hard to actively mix up if using a deployment tool. When storing the appropriate settings for each environment in the environment itself in the deployment tool, you won’t accidentally point to the development connection string when in production. Furthermore, by storing them at the right scope, you do not have to update all the release definitions or environments in which they are used. Team Services provides an easy interface to manage these variables at each of these scopes.īy storing your configuration and app settings in a deployment tool, if settings change in a given time, you only need to update the settings in the deployment tool rather than in every possible file that the setting is hard-coded in. You can also define configuration variables that are scoped to a specific release definition or to a specific environment in a release definition.
For variables that are needed in many release definitions, you can store variables in a project. Team Services allows you to manage variables and secrets at multiple levels. Here are the top five reasons to manage configuration and app settings variations per environment in a deployment tool like Visual Studio Team Services. Why manage configuration changes through Visual Studio Team Services? Visual Studio Team Services allows you to define pipelines or release definitions with configuration management and transformations for each environment. If you have sensitive data in app settings such as passwords, they should be stored in the deployment tool rather than in plaintext in settings files. The deployment tool stores the configuration values for each environment and performs configuration transforms at deployment time . Configuration and app settings changes may range from simple to complex but all generally follow the same strategy. For example, the database connection strings may point to different databases for different environments, or app settings may change between environments. The only thing that should change from one environment to the next is the configuration you want to apply. Furthermore, your production environment may itself comprise of multiple scale units, each of which you may deploy in parallel or one after the other for a gradual roll out.Īs a best practice, you would want to deploy the same bits and follow the same procedure to deploy those bits in every environment. You may want to deploy changes first to a test or staging environment before deploying to a production environment. Your continuous delivery pipeline typically consists of multiple environments.