Elias sat in the dark, sweating. He checked his OpenAI dashboard. No usage spikes. He’d caught it. He immediately rotated the key, generating a new string of gibberish, and pasted it back into a freshly created, properly ignored .env.development
Here is the distinction:
PAYMENT_GATEWAY=http://localhost:9090/mock-stripe .env.development
Since the actual .env.development file is ignored by Git, how do new team members know what variables to set? The solution is to create a commit-safe template file, usually named .env.development.example . This file contains the keys but dummy or empty values. When a new developer clones the project, they copy the example file, rename it to .env.development , and fill in their actual credentials. Elias sat in the dark, sweating