I've migrated off of Portainer to standard docker compose recently so that I can script some major tasks like updating all the containers or restarting all of them. I also liked the idea of being able to put the compose files into a git repo and push it up so that they are automatically backed up. I hope to be able to turn this into more of infrastructure as code implementation where I can edit the repo and have it auto push to my server and redeploy. That's a bit further down the line though.

That said, with the compose files living in their remote, they currently still have their secrets on them, either in a corresponding .env file or in the compose file itself. I really don't like this since if someone ever gains access to the repo they have all my services' secrets. What is the best way to use a git repo for compose files while not exposing a bunch of secrets potentially?

I know podman supports secrets, though I guess I'd have to manually ssh into the server to create them in the session. Currently these services are all through docker however.