What is the best practice for publishing settings without private data?

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I have a settings.json file containing a bunch of information including username and password for the application I'm creating. Something like:

{
    "application": {
        "username": "someuser",
        "password": "somepassword",
    }
}

I am fairly new to software development especially making open source applications and deploying them so I would like to know what is the best practice in this case. Let's say I'm publishing it on GitHub and I would like the settings.json to be available as well with the correct structure but not containing my private data. However, I would like to have it locally with the data because I use it for testing. Should I have two files maybe settings-local.json and settings-prod.json or what? Thank you.

private-key github json
1 Answers

Have a example-settings.json file with dummy data in it.

Have as many settings-ENVIRONMENT-NAME.json files as you have different environments.

Add settings-* to your .gitignore file so that real credentials do not get published by accident.

Include clear instructions (e.g. in your README) on how to name the real settings files.

Dorward_190680
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