I've had this issue affect me once or twice in the past (fortunately only with debugging settings, not secret keys). The solution for me was to create a pre-com

I've had this issue affect me once or twice in the past (fortunately only with debugging settings, not secret keys). The solution for me was to create a pre-commit script for git that looks through the diff of my commit for a special token, and aborts the commit if the token was found. Now when I make a change to a bit of code that shouldn't be committed, I'll throw in the token as an additional sanity check. For someone who had never done any git scripting before, I was surprised at how easy it was to put together - just 9 lines of bash for the simplest thing that could possibly work: https://gist.github.com/4513374 https://gist.github.com/4513374