There&#x27;s a reasonable case for including internal actors in one&#x27;s threat model for larger companies or ones working in extraordinarily sensitive product domains.  Most startups probably don&#x27;t need to prevent the team from being able to read credentials, because that&#x27;s theatre when they have 15 different ways to get to any secret the company has.<p>We use Ansible&#x27;s vault feature to decrypt a few centralized secret files onto machines at deploy time.  This lets us commit the encrypted text of the files.  (The source of truth for the key is in Trello, IIRC, but it could be anywhere you have to auth in as an employee to view.)<p>It&#x27;s modestly annoying (operations like &quot;check what changed in the secret configuration file as a result of a particular commit&quot; are impossible) but seems like a reasonable compromise to ensure that e.g. nobody can insta-create an admin session if they happen to have a copy of our codebase and a working Internet connection.<p>Secrets are communicated to processes which need them in boring Linux-y ways like &quot;file i&#x2F;o&quot; and &quot;stuff it into an environment variable that the process has access to.&quot;  If you&#x27;re capable of doing file i&#x2F;o or reading arbitrary memory, we&#x27;re in trouble.  Of course, if you can do either of those on our production infrastructure and also connect to our database, we&#x27;ve already lost, so I don&#x27;t see too much additional gain in locking down our database password.<p>If you&#x27;re starting from the position &quot;I have a Rails app which has passwords in cleartext in database.yml&quot; this is an easy thing to roll out incrementally: move the password from database.yml to ENV[&#x27;RAILS_DB_PASSWORD&#x27;], spend ~5 minutes getting your deployment infrastructure to populate that from an encrypted file (details depend on your deployment infrastructure -- I am liking ansible, a lot, for this), verify it works, then change passwords.  Voila; Github no longer knows your database password and your continuous integration system no longer knows your production credentials.  One threat down; zero coordination required with any other system you use or any other team at the company.  You can standardize on this across your entire deployment or not, your call, and it&#x27;s exactly as easy to back out of as it was to get started.