How to prevent a file from being committed to one branch but included in the commit for another?

Question

We have a cert file that belongs in our development area and we don't want to push it up to our production area.  We have separate branches for each area.  There is actually a cert file also for the production area.  So every time we commit from our development area to our production are the dev cert gets included in the production area and it causes issues.  Is there a way to have the dev cert belong to the dev branches (we have a dev, qa, and staging branch for each environment) and the prod cert belong only to the production branch ?

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Cynthia Sheek · Answer

We actually have three development environments that use the same sandbox SSL cert (required by a third-party API) and it is only one file that needs to remain on those servers.  A different SSL cert is used by the production version of the API.  THe cert shouldn't change very frequently.  We simply want to keep the cert files in the right location but don't want to commit them every time.  Right now we have to commit the prod cert separately to the repo after releasing code in order to keep the API working, because the sandbox version of the cert keeps getting committed with pushes to the dev branches.  Don't know how to fix this.

Mike Corsaro · Answer

Hello! This should be possible using .gitattributes. I assume your workflow is to merge from dev to prod? If so, you can use something like this to achieve that.