Best way to configure a run script?

Question

I am tasked with supportting a run script that uses environment variables to determine which tools to use, which directories to grab source files from, etc. This does not seem like the best technique to me. It seems like it would be much better to have configuration files that set all these things and have the run script parse this instead of relying on environment variables. For one thing it would allow others to run your tests ver easily (just point to the config file) and less prone to errors (environment variables getting contaminated) and easier to debug. I thought I had also read somewhere that best practices was to use an explict config file for these types of things.

I just wanted to get everyones thoughts on this.

Answer 1

Yes, it's often helpful to keep config separate from code (although I've seen this taken to ridiculous extremes with either too many "configurables", or long chains of dependent config files where one or two be fine).

One simple step could be moving the environment variables into a separate file and have the original script "source" the new file (which effectively becomes your "config file") - minimal changes and no additional parsing required.