Code or Configuration or Configuration in Code?
With DevOps bringing source control to configuration files and publishing to production servers being automated – bringing both code and configuration over on the same time, the difference between code and config has become less than ever (if it even exists).
A few weeks ago I reread Mike Hadlow’s brilliant post The Configuration Complexity Clock. As I’m also in the middle of setting up publishing routines for a web application I started to think about the difference between configuration and code. The more I think about it, the less clear the difference is.
A simple attempt to differentiate them would be to look at where they are stored.
- Everything in source files that are consumed by the compiler is code.
- Everything in configuration files that are read at runtime is configuration.
Unfortunately that is not the entire truth. For example the route config in an ASP.NET MVC application is a kind of configuration – but it is done in code. The same is true for the Entity Framework Code First mappings – it is done in code (either through attributes or a fluent API), but is a kind of mapping configuration. An example of the other way around is startup configuration scripts (think of *nix .bashrc or the old autoexec.bat on DOS systems). It is configuration, but is run as a script.
There are definitely cases where it is not that simple to define what is configuration and what is code.
And does it really matter?
