why is database.yml in gitignore?

[SampsonCrowley]

database.yml should never contain sensitive secrets directly.

I'm curious how you personally deploy to something like heroku when database.yml is not in the repo that will be compiled

[SampsonCrowley]

for instance, I have absolutely no fear posting my databse.yml here for the world to see:

default: &default
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  pool: <%= ENV.fetch("RAILS_MAX_THREADS") { 5 } %>
  schema_search_path: public

development:
  <<: *default
  database: down_under_sports_six_development

test:
  <<: *default
  database: down_under_sports_six_test

production:
  <<: *default
  url: <%= ENV['DATABASE_URL'] %>

[mattbrictson]

Great question. This is something I'd like to fix!

The history behind this is that I ran into cases where different developers on a given team would have their PostgreSQL installed slightly differently. Some required connecting with a username postgres, some required a password, some not. So a single database.yml config wouldn't work for everyone. By putting it in .gitignore, then each developer could customize it to work on their machine.

These days everyone I know seems to install PostgreSQL via homebrew, so there is a lot more consistency. So a single database.yml checked into source control should work out of the box for most people. To handle edge cases people can use environment variables to override the defaults; e.g. PGHOST, PGUSER, etc.

Does that sound like the right approach?

[mattbrictson]

I'm curious how you personally deploy to something like heroku when database.yml is not in the repo that will be compiled

FYI Heroku automatically creates the database.yml for you, which is why an app without a database.yml can still be deployed:

https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/blob/249d3c1a4e97068f8fd016f10fa0839709d95658/lib/language_pack/ruby.rb#L954

[mattbrictson]

Fixed in 2fb82a0

[SampsonCrowley]

huh, I had no idea that was part of the buildpack and I even have contributed to it before

[SampsonCrowley]

Yeah I would say those edge cases are getting increasingly rare on development machines, but they should always be handling those with env variables, not with secrets in the yml file, so your update shouldn't cause problems for anyone doing things the right way