I don't think storing passwords in any format in source control is good. Like someone else said, it's mixing app logic with deployment. We use a combination of

I don't think storing passwords in any format in source control is good. Like someone else said, it's mixing app logic with deployment. We use a combination of Google's open source Keyczar [1] and a relatively new Python keyring [2] library which uses the Keyczar crypter to read/write keys to a keyring storage backend, where the backend interface can be implemented with local crypted files or a cloud service. [1] http://www.keyczar.org/ http://www.keyczar.org/ [2] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyring http://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyring We built this Python wrapper called appauth around of the concept of a Keyring service by application domain. e.g. pseudo code: import appauth auth_service = appauth.AuthService('my-web-app') db_creds_cfg = auth_service.get('primary-db') Inside of db_creds_cfg, it can be a free-form dictionary that provides whatever details is needed to get into a resource: db_creds_cfg['db_host'] db_creds_cfg['db_port'] db_creds_cfg['username'] db_creds_cfg['password'] I put in some honest effort to find an open source solution to this, but failed to find anything with a simple install process AND programming interface. Is there any interest from HN if we choose to open source this? Furthermore, we use Google Authenticator on our servers to require two-factor auth: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/ http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/, on top of disabling password auth in favor of signing in with ssh keys. All log files are then either set to permission 600 just to be super paranoid.