How do you test your configuration files in production?

How do you make sure that the right values have been placed in the right configuration files?
How do you test it (safely)? Just staging environment?
How do you automate the process? do you have any configuration verification utilities?
Do you test them individually? or just as part of your rollout tests?

Can you elaborate?

Thanks for sharing ;)

Comments

[Chris James]

It's honestly difficult to test and also not really desirable. Changing MAXIMUM_CATS from 100 to 200 shouldn't cause a test failure should it? In these cases you can logically say, "what if the test assertion is wrong?"

At this level, what you really care about is whether your app is working in production.

For this use:

• Monitoring with threshold alerts. So for a web app if you get over N non 200s over a period then someone should know about it automatically.
• Smoke tests running on production
• Browser tests for key scenarios running on the live site (assuming it's a website)