I have a situation, where my program (C#, ASP.NET Core Web API) is used by various customers and they all have slightly different setups. They all use different connection strings, and some only have a production environment and some have both test and production environments. And from time to time I have to attach to their system from Visual Studio, so I can debug the code.

Here is what I’m do right now. Let me know if you have any suggestions or better ideas.

I have a serviceconfiguration.json file with configuration shared accross all setup.
My appsettings.json contains the settings I’m using when running in Visual Studio. When have to debug a customer, I manually change values in appsettings.json so they match the customer.

I have a seperate settings file for each customer+setup (placed in /Properties/PublishingProfiles)

• customer_a_sandbox.appsettings.json
• customer_a_production.appsettings.json
• customer_b.appsettings.json

I also have publishing profile for each customer+setup.

• customer_a_sandbox.pubxml
• customer_a_production.pubxml
• customer_b.pubxml

In each .pubxml I have added (replace customer_a_sandbox for the relevant configuration):

    <ItemGroup>
        <Content Remove="appsettings.json"/>
        <ResolvedFileToPublish Include=".PropertiesPublishingProfilescustomer_a_sandbox.appsettings.json">
            <RelativePath>appsettings.json</RelativePath>
        </ResolvedFileToPublish>
    </ItemGroup>

And finally, I have this is my c# code:

builder.Configuration.AddJsonFile("serviceconfiguration.json", false);

To build for a customer I run:

dotnet publish -p:PublishProfile="customer_a_sandbox" -o publishedFiles

I’m thinking that I cannot be the first developer, that face this situation where multiple customers use the same program but with various configurations.

How do you handle individual configurations for each customer?