Generally we check-in just development AppSettings that refer to things like “localhost:3456”, etc. but we have some instances where we can’t run the service on our locals.

Why? one good example is the work we do against our on-premise TFS server, while i have considered an F5 experience that “runs up” a TFS server on a developers local I just don’t think we (or most people) have the budget to spend on a workstation that will handle this. Also add the other services we do integration against as well (TeamCity, Octopus, etc.)

We use a separate project in TFS, octopus etc and sometimes separate servers, for our development work so we aren’t interfering with live systems, but the credentials and URL aren’t something i want appearing in GitHub public Repos.

So how we work around this is a very old setting

<configuration>
<appSettings file="../../../MyRepoName.config">
<add key="TeamCityPassword" value="XXXXX" />
<add key="TeamCityUserName" value="ABCDE" />

The above usage of the file property points to a location outside the repo, i have setup a config file like this for each public repo that i use.

The good thing about this as well is if that file is not present (i.e. when its deployed to production) then it simply ignores it.You could also remove it with the Web.Release.config transform as well to be clean about it, example below.

<appSettings xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(file)"/>