Question

When working on rails project (I’m still in the “beginner” phase of learning at the moment by the way) the file config/database.yml seems to be the one where things like database passwords etc. go. However, nobody seems to recommend putting it in the .gitignore file – why?

Surely I would need to exclude this or my sensitive database configuration details would end up being public knowledge if I pushed to github.

Answer 1

database.yml is the proper place for configuring your database credentials. Normally you’d commit database.yml while only configured with your development and testing environments.

I don’t have passwords on my local Postgres and MySQL instances so I can safely commit database.yml. If you want to ignore it, just add database.yml line to the end of your .gitignore file. You’ll need to make sure it’s cleaned up and committed before ignoring it. Then you can make your changes safely.

Once you deploy to production you would symlink it in from a copy already stored on that server with the sensitive credentials.