Two different connection strings for web.config in Git

Question

I'm fairly new to Git and I'm currently migrating a project that was in SVN to Git. The way that it currently works is that there is a dev directory on the server and a production directory on the server. Dev and production each have a separate database and thus have a different connection string in their respective web.config's. I'm going to be using the gitflow workflow so I'll be merging dev into master when changes are ready for production so I'll somehow need to have the web.config on the dev branch have one connection string and have a separate connection string on the production branch. Is there any logical way of doing this?

Answer 1

In asp.net you may want to look into web.config transformation. There's probably already a web.release.config and a web.debug.config in you project. They can be used to switch the connection string depending on which build configuration (build, debug, etc) you use to build your application.

Another idea which I've run into is including your connection strings in a separate file like:

<configuration>  
    <connectionStrings configSource="connectionStrings.config" />
</configuration>

which would cause .NET to load the connection strings from the connectionStrings.config file. Then that file is ignored in version control, and the dev version is distributed in the local development environments, the staging version is placed on the staging server and then the production one stays in production.

There are definitely more solutions than just these out there. But I've had decent luck with both of these options in a smaller gitflow type environment.