You might consider using Config::Simple or Config::Auto. I've found these to be very useful. For example, I'll put all my path info (for things like templates used by HTML::Template), Database settings (table names, username, password), etc. into a config file in the same directory as the script. There are really two config files: one for development (dev-config.ini) and one for production (prod-config.ini). The script reads a file called config.ini, but this is really a symbolic link. On the production machine config.ini points to prod-config.ini and on the development machine it points to dev-config.ini. You could accomplish the same thing using environment variables, but this seems to work better for me.