How do you manage development-only files in your source control? [duplicate]

Question

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How do I merge branches between Develop - Test and Production without moving across 'test' specific code? (2 answers)

Closed 1 year ago.

When merging development code into the production code, what is the preferred method for handling items that should not be in the production code branch? For example, I have configuration scripts that are configured for the test servers in the development branch, and I have the same scripts also configured for the production severs in the production branch. This causes conflicts when merging from dev to prod.

Answer 1

Solve the issue at deployment time.

As in, your production branch has all the dev configs and such. When you have a tool building and deploying your code, that re-configures your application to run in production. This avoids merge conflicts (your production configs aren't in the same file, the build tool overwrites it), and gives you a ton of control over where you actually keep those production configs.

Since many places want to keep the production configs safer than you keep the rest of their code - to help avoiding accidental breaks in production, to keep secrets safe, whatever. Solving this issue at deploy time helps, since it allows you to keep production configs in a more secure repo (maybe only leads have write-access to help prevent accidental breakage), or lets you keep secrets (keys) in an actual secure keystore, where the only allowed access is via the build tool.