I'm writing an application which has, among other things, web-based administration. The admin panel has to store configuration variables, and I need a generic interface for this so it's easily updatable. It should also fulfil the following conditions:

1) Works on NT as well as Unixen
2) Works for unprivileged users on a server
3) Secure!

At first I was going to use Data::Dumper and dump config variables to a perl file which could then be "require"d by the main application. But because the admin is web-based, this would mean either having a world-writable file to be required (breaks (3) badly!) or having a setuid script (dangerous, may be disallowed on many servers, kernel problems).

Now I am thinking, a DBM file. But I don't know if this will work on NT. And presumably we still either need a world-writable DBM file, or a setuid script.

Has anyone got any useful alternatives? Is there a secure way of dumping data to be "require"d or read in later?

Cheers
David

In reply to Web-based configuration and secure data storage by dash2

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