Question

Sometimes when you’re working with your local copy you might have configuration settings stored that you do not wish to commit and is impractical to ignore the file because it also contains application specific settings.

For example, a Django settings.py file contains both database connection details and project settings, such as which applications to load.

Is there a way to sanitize these types of files when they are committed? And is there a way to restore your own local settings during a checkout again?

My current environment is Linux and command line SubVersion

Answer 1

One way to address this problem is to keep the “standard” configuration file in a different file altogether, such as settings.py.example. In your working copy, you would copy settings.py.example to settings.py and work with the copy. If you need to make a change to the standard configuration, change settings.py.example and check it in. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to change it, and your modified settings.py isn’t even in version control so it doesn’t get noticed (you can include it in the svn:ignore property to make it even more quiet).