I’ve launched yet another open source project on GitHub a couple of months ago and now it’s time to use it in production. For that, I had to put some confidential information in a file that is currently tracked by Git. That was the database connection credentials that I keep in a property file. Obviously, I couldn’t push that file to GitHub and I did’t want to keep that file in my staging area forever, but I still wanted to keep the file in the repository, so people could use it to configure their own development/production databases as well.

The file I’m talking about is usi4biz/resources/db-config.edn. Notice that I’ve put pretty dumb credential information there just to make it work in my development environment. This file doesn’t exist anymore in the master branch. I had to do a little tweak, inspired by WordPress, to address the issue.

Before adding any confidential info, I renamed the file to db-config-example.edn:

$ git mv resources/db-config.edn resources/db-config-example.edn
$ git add resources/db-config-example.edn
$ git commit -m "Renamed the database configuration file"

Then, I copied the file and named it after the original name:

$ cp resources/db-config-example.edn resources/db-config.edn

I edited the new file and added the production credentials. Now, I just have to ask Git to ignore it:

$ echo -e "resources/db-config.edn\n" >> .gitignore

This way, db-config.edn will be always out of my staging area whenever I change it. I just have to remember that if I ever need to add a new property I have to do it in both files. For the moment, I just explained in the README file that those wiling to use the application have to copy the file db-config-example.edn with the name db-config.edn because the code refers the file db-config.edn.