2024-09-30 Weekly Update - Cleaning git history, blog meta-updates, and new developer line tools

This week’s update is again focused on technical content. I’ve written up some notes on clearing your git history, some updates to this blog, and some new tools I’ve started using in my daily workflow. I hope you enjoy it and reach out if you want to chat about anything I’ve written.

Removing Sensitive Data From Git

The other day I was working with a consulting client and trying to live-fix a bug on a call. I was going too fast and I ended up accidentally committing an API key to our repo and pushing the change. Fortunately, we’re the only two people who have access to the repo, but I still wanted to properly scrub it from the repo.

I haven’t had to scrub a git history for a private key in a few years. Since then, the recommended tool for cleaning up a git history has gone from git-filter-branch to git-filter-repo. I had a pretty easy time finding suggestions on how to delete a word/file from the history but I had a harder time finding a command to verify that the text was removed.

I’ve captured both in here and subbed <REDACTED> for the sensitive text.

# Check that the API key is in fact in the repo history
bash-3.2$ git log -S <REDACTED> main --name-only --pretty=format: | sort -u
template_notebook.ipynb
 
# Replace all references to the API key in all commits to ADD_API_KEY
bash-3.2$ uv run git-filter-repo --force --replace-text <(echo "<REDACTED>==>ADD_API_KEY")
Parsed 22 commits
New history written in 0.03 seconds; now repacking/cleaning...
Repacking your repo and cleaning out old unneeded objects
HEAD is now at 27440ad Replaced unmaintained pdfminer with pdfminer.six (#11)
Enumerating objects: 76, done.
Counting objects: 100% (76/76), done.
Delta compression using up to 10 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (35/35), done.
Writing objects: 100% (76/76), done.
Total 76 (delta 42), reused 69 (delta 39), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Completely finished after 0.10 seconds.
 
# Check that the API references are gone
bash-3.2$ git log -S "<REDACTED>" main --name-only --pretty=format: | sort -u
 
# Confirm that they have been replaced by ADD_API_KEY
bash-3.2$ git log -S "ADD_API_KEY" main --name-only --pretty=format: | sort -u
template_notebook.ipynb
 
# I'm always scared when I run this one ...
bash-3.2$ git push origin -f main:main
Enumerating objects: 76, done.
Counting objects: 100% (76/76), done.
Delta compression using up to 10 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (32/32), done.
Writing objects: 100% (76/76), 90.13 KiB | 90.13 MiB/s, done.
Total 76 (delta 42), reused 76 (delta 42), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (42/42), done.
To <REDACTED>
 + 4da8e1f...27440ad main -> main (forced update)

Hopefully this is not something I need to do for a few more years but I figured it was worth capturing it in some notes for myself and others.

Blog Updates

Version Update: I updated my blog dependencies including bumping the blog framework to Nextra v3.0. This required massaging some configuration files but overall was not too bad. Most importantly, it seems to have fixed a bug where some new posts were not being added to the main post feed.

Weekly Updates Titles: Now that I have 2 months of weekly notes I realized that I need more descriptive titles for my posts than just the date. I’ve added more description to the titles and you can now find all those posts under the weekly-update tag.

New (To Me) Developer Tools

At the start of this sabbatical I set up a new laptop and I used that as an excuse to try out some new developer tools. As a result, I ended up replacing a surprising number tools that were previously daily-drivers for me. Here’s what’s new to me:

One of the themes in my new choices is working more in the terminal. You can see that in my moving from Sublime Text to LazyVim. That prompted me to move from iTerm2 to Kitty for performance reasons. I still love the Fish shell but went for a more stripped back prompt over my previous powerline9000 inspired configuration. Lastly, like everyone else in the Python ecosystem, I’ve been joining the Astral bandwagon and moving my workflow over to uv from Poetry (and pipenv before that). I suspect I’ll migrate off of pyenv in a few weeks as I get more comfortable with uv.

Updates like this feel like a “spring cleaning” of my tech stack and are one of the reasons that I don’t backup my config/dotfiles between machines. First of all, I don’t tend to use tool that require a ton of configuration out of the box. But more to the point, having to configure each of my machines separately helps me discover new tools, drop tools that I don’t miss, and makes sure I really understand my tools well enough to troubleshoot them.

This work by Alex C. Viana is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4