Where should I store the connection string for the production environment of my ASP.NET Core app?

Question

Where should the production and staging connection strings be stored in an ASP.NET Core application, when deploying into IIS 7 (not Azure) ?

I am looking for the recommended way of doing it / best-practice, especially security-wise.

Answer 1

In ASP.NET 5 it's possible to specify multiple configuration sources. Thanks to this welcoming change to previous model you can store your development connection string in simple json file, and your staging and production connection string in environment variables directly on the respective servers.

If you configure your app like this :

var config = new Configuration()
.AddJsonFile("config.json")
.AddEnvironmentVariables();

and there is connection string in both config.json and environment variable then environment source will win.

So, store your development connection string in config.json(and freely check in in source control) and production one in environment variable. More info here and here.