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I am an amateur developper and would like to share some of my code via GitHub or GitLabs.

The problem I am trying to resolve is that I have a configuration file with my real credentials (used during development) and would like to provide a generic one (with placehholders for the credentials) -- all this without changing the code.

In practical terms I have today (in pseudo-code)

arguments = yaml.read("configuration.yaml")

and would like to avoid dragging a 

# do not forget to switch the config files before pushing to github arguments = yaml.read("configuration-dev.yaml") #arguments = yaml.read("configuration.yaml")

Is there an established method for such issues? (generally speaking - elements in code which are specific to an installation, but with the need to send generic/placeholder entries)

Note: I am mostly developping in Python if it makes an approach easier

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Im not sure these are the established methods, nonetheless the often seen approach is to use either environment variables or config merging.

Using Env variables

This allows you to specify a default config or, when a certain ENV_VAR is defined, to use that environment var.

The example code would be (using Python's ConfigParser INI files):

config_path = os.environ.get('ENV_VAR', 'default_config.ini') config = ConfigParser() config.read(config_path)

The advantage is that you could use the same method to deploy with a production_config.ini. Just call your code as:

$ ENV_VAR='prod_config.ini' my_python_script.py

Using config merging

Again, Python's ConfigParser allows you to read a list of config files, where options defined in successive files overwrite previous ones. If specified files do not exist, they are ignored. This is effectively config merging.

(...) config.read(['generic_config.ini', 'local_config.ini'])

If you're using YAML you might need to provide custom logic for config merging.

In both cases, the local_config.ini should be ignored and not committed to the repository. This allows every team member/contributor to have his/her own local_config.ini automatically used.

Make sure never to commit credentials to the code repository!

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