What is the best way to handle configuration files with git?

Question

Say my application has a configuration files in plain-text. They contain some sensitive information which is required to test the application in my dev environment. I use different OSes to access and work on my projects (win, mac, ... ).

I do not wish some of the information in the configuration files to make it to my public git repository. In best case I want the sensitive information to be replaced with placeholders and have the configuration files uploaded to the repository to keep track of their structure.

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How would you approach the problem?

The hook itself wouldn't be much of a problem for me to write. I'm more interested how to tie it all together, possible directory structure, etc. I'm quite new to git.

Answer 1

There's a convention followed in the Django world that you could use - there is a standard settings.py file that imports a local_settings module at the end if there is one available.

Have all your secret stuff in that local_settings.py file and add it to .gitignore so that it doesn't go to the repository. This way, people will know that they can add their own settings to local_settings.

For example,

settings.py:

DATABASE_USERNAME = 'your username here'
DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'your password here'

local_settings.py:

DATABASE_USERNAME = 'my top secret username'
DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'my top secret password'

The best part is that whatever you've defined in settings.py will get overridden by the same name in local_settings.py.