You simply don't push anything that has sensitive information in it. You pick and choose. Stow makes this easy, because the only things being pushed are files y

You simply don't push anything that has sensitive information in it. You pick and choose. Stow makes this easy, because the only things being pushed are files you explicitly move to a specific directory. Real world example: - Let's say I want to version control ~/.ssh/config and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys - I move these two files to ~/.dotfiles/ssh - ~/.dotfiles is version controlled, so I push the new files to gitlab. I'm only pushing two harmless files: my ssh configs, and authorized keys. Git, stow, and ~/.dotfiles don't see anything else. - After pushing, I run "stow ssh" inside ~/.dotfiles. This symlinks these two files to ~/.ssh I don't worry about pushing anything sensitive, because it's basically impossible for me to accidentally move something to ~/.dotfiles and then run 'git push.'