[Catalyst] Deployment: Dev/Testing/Staging/Production

[Bill Moseley]

Anyone have a nice real-world setup for managing different application
configurations?

My application runs in four modes:

I use $app_server.pl for development, and then I have frontend/backend
apache and mod_perl servers for testing (on dev machine), staging
(on hardware that matches production), and the production setup.

Running the dev server is easy since Catalyst knows which Engine it
is using and I can test that when needed.

But, for the Apache configurations I have a two shell scripts, one for
the front-end apache, and one for the back-end mod_perl. The shell
scripts pass -D settings to httpd.conf to set Listen, ServerRoot,
DocRoot, mod_disk_cache location and SSL config.  The back-end
mod_perl server should be easier, but it has to tell Catalyst the
hostnames & ports of the front-end server SSL and non-SSL server (so
C::P::RequireSSL can do its thing), and has to know which database to
use.

I'm planning on changing things a bit and use separate
dev/testing/staging/production directories to hold the configuration
files.  But, I thought it good to ask here first.

Does anyone have a nice clever setup for managing these configs?


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org