Change connection string from development to production when publishing

c# asp.net asp.net-mvc-4 azure web.config-transform
General Electric picture General Electric · Sep 4, 2015 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I want to know how to change automatically the connection string of my app so when I'm working on it in my pc, it uses my local SQL Server and once I publish it then uses the SQL Server I have hosted on azure.

Right now I'm just commenting out the connection string depending of what I want, I saw that the Web.Config file has 2 dependencies, Web.Debug.config and Web.Release.config which is where I guess I have to do something but I don't know what.

This is my web.config file so far

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="MyApp" connectionString="Data Source=mydb.database.windows.net;Initial Catalog=MyDb;User [email protected];Password=MyPwd;Encrypt=true;Trusted_Connection=false;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  <!--<add name="MyApp" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" connectionString="Server=.\SQLEXPRESS;Database=MyDb;Integrated Security=True;" />-->
  </connectionStrings

As you can see I have 2 connection strings that I have comment out but doing this is really annoying.

Answer

Steve picture Steve · Sep 4, 2015

The two configs are built for their respective build setting, so you can put your dev connection string in Web.Debug.config and your prod connection string in Web.Release.config. Then, when you deploy to production, run a Release build and your resulting Web.Config will have the production connection string.

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