You should establish a proper pattern for storing credentials instead. Many people use environment variables, but you can also use an external configuration file.
Another simple pattern used a lot in django:
try:
from local_settings import *
except Exception:
pass
Then put any variable you want to override in local_settings.py and put local_settings.py in .gitignore
I contract for a company which has set rules for their stuff. Trying to change these rules would be an amount of effort similar to becoming CEO, starting out as a deckswabber.
One of their project is a web app. It has an .htaccess file. In production it is configured to run like this:
Addhandler fcgid-script .fcgi
However in development i want it to run like this:
Addhandler cgi-script .fcgi
Normally you'd just put the entire file on ignore with --assume-unchanged, but that doesn't work well, since the file also contains other bits of configuration that are important for the app, and get changed fairly frequently.
Projects sometimes check in an IDE formatting file settings to ensure that all developers use the same formatting. There are a couple of times where I wanted to add my own little formatting detail (which didn't conflict with the project's) but couldn't because doing so would mark that file modified and force me to remember to undo my changes before each push.
With the hack from the article, I have now a working solution out of this.
FWIW we moved to a .htaccess.dist setup and our build tool would populate the actual .htaccess file with either of your examples depending if you were building for development or production.
.htaccess is ignored while the .htaccess.dist template is part of the reop
We only need to rebuild that file when we want to change it, which doesn't happen often. It's been at least a year since I changed my local dev copy for our main project and has survived many pulls/branches/resets
What kinda stuff are you putting in .htaccess that changes so often?
What happens if someone accidentaly committed the Addhandler cgi-script .fcgi change?
Note that --assume-unchanged means you are promissing to git that the file hasn't changed, so it doesn't have to lookt at it every time you invoke git status (for performance reasons).
When you break that promise, git will complain, just like you said.
"Of course this is a stupid example, you would probably
put the username, password and other important stuff in
another file, say a config file, but let’s assume that
this is not possible, or somehow this variable cannot be
else where."
I'd still argue that this is an anti-pattern. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to leave out a line from git in the middle of a file, you should reconsider the structure of your code/project/whatever.
Agreed. The article isn't particularly useful because it essentially says "this is how you solve a 'problem' that I'm only going to demonstrate by giving an example I immediately dismiss" and not explaining the type of situation in which this might be useful. Every time I've found myself in a similar situation, the problem has not been that git doesn't allow me to pretend that certain lines in a file don't exist, it's been that my design has been lacking.
E.g. I build a new virtualenv from scratch for each deploy, so that would mean that the postactivate script would need to be accessed from somewhere by the build process.
I was talking about local dev install where you can activate postactivate script is run after you source activate or call workon. In prod, you will not be activating the env but running executables directly from the env.
ie, your process manager will call /path/to/env/bin/gunicorn and in this case, you'll have to configure the env variables here (in the process manager (supervisor)) config.
I could see some uses for something like this. When I was working as a web programmer, I often had to do a lot if dev-server type things. Since at least one of the dev-server was often on my personal machine, it could often be a very different beast than the production server.
I guess what this really is a matter of is configuration management, for certain configurations you will have certain lines of code that will not matter or that will confuse. While you can manage this within your code in various ways (such as the #ifdef _DEBUG macro, etc.), it would be natural for the VC to handle this.
For a general features, maybe you could either specify in a configuration file, particular lines of a file or a regular expression to designate lines to ignore or better yet to only apply to certain branch checkouts.
A nice feature to think about for my "one-of-these-days-I-will-make-a-beter-version-control-system" file.
In practice, I never use 'commit -a' or 'git add -A'. I prefer to use 'git gui' to interactively stage files or just specific lines. This way I can be sure of what is being committed.
git add -i is a good idea, but the interface is just /atrocious/ - confusing, poorly worded, visually unattractive and hard to read (dark blue text is not very user friendly on a black background).
I guess it's a matter of taste. I would find the context switching between the shell and the GUI more jarring than the usability of `git add -i`. Also, shell colours can be adjusted.
But in the end it's good to have multiple options.
I've defaulted to this for some time now, and have no issues with keeping my own smattering of me-specific configuration overrides. Plus, there are a couple other times when being able to work through the patching interface is a handy skill to have.
Not as generic a solution as ignoring lines on commit (whatever they may contain or for whatever reason you want to hide them), but when it comes to protecting credentials, crypto for arbitrary chunks of text comes in handy.¹ The fact that the encrypted string is being committed still might be a good thing: as the code is run an error will be thrown as a reminder to either decrypt or replace the string with one’s own creds.
This is exactly what I was looking for few months back.
I was working on a rather large and very messy project back then. Project used popular framework with very specific config files but previous dev choose to ignore them most of the time so configurations were all over the place. I didn't have much time to start looking more deeply into the git so I just ended up using 'local-config' branch that had my environment specific configs that I always rebased on top of master and deleted on commit. Wasn't perfect solution but it worked.
Use the -p (--patch) flag, it works wonderfully for selectively marking blocks for staging (git add -p), and selectively checking out changed files with (git checkout -p).
My experience is that you'll quickly get burned if you do this for the use case the OP mentioned. The goal is to keep different settings for a development environment, not to just temporarily avoid committing. One day, you'll inevitably forget and accidentally commit and push the changes you've been carefully avoiding.
I've not had that experience at all. For the times you know it would be tedious to add/ignore all diffs manually, you can just use the 'a' or 'd' commands to add or ignore for the remainder of the current file. I much prefer using 'add -p' every single time I commit.
I think I would handle it by making a "template file", scrubbed from the secret sauce and a script that patches the template file into the real thing.
Only template file is checked into the repo.
You can put MySQL or MySQLi connection credentials in php.ini. Bu ignore line will be useful for me too, I have a second connection to the reports database.
Another simple pattern used a lot in django:
try: from local_settings import * except Exception: pass
Then put any variable you want to override in local_settings.py and put local_settings.py in .gitignore