What is the best practice for dealing with passwords in git repositories?

git bash security github passwords
kubi picture kubi · Mar 7, 2010 · Viewed 85.9k times · Source

I've got a little Bash script that I use to access twitter and pop up a Growl notification in certain situations. What's the best way to handle storing my password with the script?

I would like to commit this script to the git repo and make it available on GitHub, but I'm wondering what the best way to keep my login/password private while doing this is. Currently, the password is stored in the script itself. I can't remove it right before I push because all the old commits will contain the password. Developing without a password isn't an option. I imagine that I should be storing the password in an external config file, but I thought I'd check to see if there was an established way to handle this before I tried and put something together.

Answer

Greg Hewgill picture Greg Hewgill · Mar 7, 2010

The typical way to do this is to read the password info from a configuration file. If your configuration file is called foobar.config, then you would commit a file called foobar.config.example to the repository, containing sample data. To run your program, you would create a local (not tracked) file called foobar.config with your real password data.

To filter out your existing password from previous commits, see the GitHub help page on Removing sensitive data.

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