How to push code to Github hiding the API keys?

Question

I want to push some codes to my GitHub Repository. These codes are in different languages like Javascript, Java, Python etc. Some of those codes contain some private API key that I don't want to publish.

Is there any way to hide the keys automatically.? Should I remove it from my code manually.?

There are many projects that I want to push to GitHub. So, manual removal is not a good option.

Answer 1

You should consider using .env files and read the keys from the environmental variables. How to do so depends on the language and tools you use (for node.js, php, etc.).

You can exclude .env file from commits by adding .env to the .gitignore. You can also upload an example configuration .env.example with dummy data or blanks to show the schema your application requires.

Answer 2

Any time you have files with sensitive data like

config.yml 

you MUST NOT commit them to your repository. I'll show you an example.

Suppose you have a yaml file with some username and password:

# app/config/credentials.yml credentials:     username: foo     password: bar 

If you want to hide the foo and the bar values, remove this file from your repository, but add a distribution file that aims to maintain username and password fields, but without any real values:

# app/config/credentials.yml.dist credentials:     username: ~     password: ~ 

During installation you can get this file by copying app/config/credentials.yml.dist to app/config/credentials.yml.

Also, remember to add app/config/credentials.yml to your .gitignore file.

Its the same with api keys:

# app/config/config.yml config:     credentials:         username: foo         password: bar     api_stuffs:         api_foo: fooooo         api_secret: baaaaar         api_token: tooooken 

This works well for configuration files, and is a good pattern that saves you every time you need to share the structure of a configuration but not sensitive data. Init files, configurations and so on.