What is the best practice for dealing with passwords in git repositories?
bash, git, github, passwords, security
Solution
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.
Problem
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.