Whenever I’ve writing scripts that rely on credentials defined as environment variables, I like to create a .env (or equivalent) file containing those variables. I then seed that file with placeholder values for each variable and make local changes that aren’t checked in.

I recently created the mneedham/materialize-sandbox/strava repository where I’m using this approach with a .envsettings file that has the following contents:

I have that file checked in so that anybody else can clone the repository and update this file with their own credentials.

But I don’t want local changes to that file to be tracked, as I might then accidentally commit my credentials. I’d previously achieved this by adding .envsettings to the .gitignore file, but that technique doesn’t seem to work anymore!

Luckily there is a way around this, using git’s update-index command, which I learnt about from Borealid’s answer on StackOverflow.

So once I’ve committed the .envsettings file, I can have git ignore any changes by running the following command:

And now git will ignore any local changes made to this file, which is exactly what I want!