Safely store Twitter Oauth tokens, public Github repository

Question

In my Rails app I want to use the Twitter gem for accessing the Twitter API. I'm storing the OAuth secrets in a file under config/initializers/twitter.rb Since I want to put the code in a public repository on Github my first reaction was to incude the file in gitignore . However, this solution does not work with hosting on Heroku, which requires a git repository that includes the secrets.

Answer 1

Loading the OAuth secrets from environment variables using something like Dotenv ( https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv ) would allow you to set and use them locally and in Heroku without having to store them in a file. See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars for setting env variables in Heroku.