Is it safe to store my Alfred Preferences in an open source dotfiles Repo?

[petermpe]

Hi there,

I tried searching the forums for "dotfiles" & found several results for searching dotfiles but not saving my Alfred preferences there.

Is this safe? My dotfiles repo lives on github: https://github.com/peterpme/dotfiles and I'd like to keep all config settings there.

 

Thanks!

[deanishe]

2 minutes ago, petermpe said:

Is this safe?

 

It depends what you've got in your preferences. Your clipboard history isn't stored in there, but your snippets are. And some workflows store API keys in their preferences sheet, which means they're also in there.

[petermpe]

Interesting! Do folks usually keep it open? Is there a way I can strip my API keys out?

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, petermpe said:

Do folks usually keep it open?

 

AFAIK, keeping your Alfred preferences in git is uncommon. It makes sense as a versioning/backup solution, but isn't ideal for syncing because of all the manual committing and pulling/pushing you have to do, and how easy it is to run into merge problems if you aren't extremely diligent about committing and pushing/pulling changes.

 

It's generally assumed that you'll use a "live" syncing mechanism like Dropbox, so workflows are not shy about changing their own files (especially info.plist, which the official settings API also changes).

 

1 hour ago, petermpe said:

Is there a way I can strip my API keys out?

 

No super easily, no. Using a private git repo would be the best solution. Otherwise, you could perhaps rig something up with git hooks.

[vitor]

3 hours ago, deanishe said:

Using a private git repo would be the best solution.

 

To add, you can now have private Github repos for free.

Edited November 17, 2019 by deanishe
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