Definitely worth a shot.

One thing I do to prevent stuff from getting into a public git repo is:

• In the git repo, make a file called .gitignore then add the line .env to it. Then git will ignore any file named .env
• edit compose files from a computer that is separate from the one that gets secrets. I have my desktop setup to push to github. Then I make a change, then simply run `git pull on my server to download the changes.
• make the .env only viewable by root (you’ll have to use sudo nano) by running sudo chmod 600 .env && sudo chown root:root .env

I have mine in git! I have:

-docker
  - .env
  - <thing name>
      - dockers-compose.yml

Then using docker compose --env-file ../.env -v up -d it uses the above .env file. (../ means up one folder)

For more details and a bunch of my compose files checkout my repo! https://github.com/shadybraden/homelab/tree/main/docker