How do I open source my Rails' apps without giving away the app's secret keys and credentials

Question

I have a number of Rails apps hosted on GitHub. They are all currently private, and I often will deploy them from their GitHub repository. I\'d like to be able to make some

Answer 1

I recently went through this with one of my own apps. My solution was to store anything secret in a git-ignored YAML config file, and then to access that file using a simple class in the initializers directory. The config file is stored in the 'shared' folder for the Capistrano deployment and copied to config at each deploy.

Config store: http://github.com/tsigo/jugglf/blob/master/config/initializers/juggernaut.rb

Example usage: https://github.com/tsigo/jugglf/blob/6b91baae72fbe4b1f7efa2759bb472541546f7cf/config/initializers/session_store.rb

You may also want to remove from source control all history of the file that used these secret values. Here's a guide for doing this in Git that I used: http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data/