10 Things You Should Never Commit

A few mishaps I’ve been on the receiving end of prompted me to write this list. It is by no means definitive.

1. Large binary files. Take a step back and facepalm yourself. Media (images, video, audio) doesn’t belong in your code repository.¹
2. CSV databases. Import it into a database and be done with it. Better yet, go over to nodejitsu and build a service you can query.
3. Dependency modules. Mix them in as part of a build step, but keeping revisions of dependencies is retarded especially considering they are often managed in their own repository.
4. Other revision management software. Once I tried to use git to version a svn working copy. Those were dark days.
5. Puppies. No matter how cute they are, putting living mammals in your code repository is not a good idea.
6. Platform specific code. Don’t build something for FreeBSD and commit it when you’re deploying to a Linux server.
7. Build folders. Rip that out. rm -rf is the only suitable hook when you have a build folder. This is source control management. Not binary files I generated with my make script management.
8. Configuration files. Configuration templates sure, but don’t commit every single platform and deployments config file to your repo. It reeks of juvenile developer.
9. Sensitive information. If I had a nickel for every time I saw MySQL root passwords committed I would have over $450.00. Put that in a config file and then see point #8.
10. Data. Data goes into a database. Something specifically designed to handle your data. Doesn’t matter if it’s sample data, production data, or whatever data. It doesn’t belong.