Exercise 1: The Reversed Secrets Philosophy — Possible Solution
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WHAT THE TWO FILES ARE
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Per this chapter, config/credentials.yml.enc holds the application's actual secrets, encrypted, and is committed to the repository as ordinary source code. config/master.key is the one file capable of decrypting it, and it's the file excluded from the repository via .gitignore.

WHY THIS IS THE REVERSE OF THE .env PATTERN
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Per this chapter, every sibling course kept its plain, unencrypted secrets in a .env file and deliberately excluded that entire file from version control. Rails does the opposite: rather than keeping the secrets themselves out of the repo, it keeps the secrets in the repo, protected by encryption, and excludes only the single small key needed to unlock them. The thing kept out of version control is the key, not the secrets.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It correctly identifies what each file contains and its role, and correctly explains that Rails' approach inverts the .env pattern - committing encrypted secrets rather than excluding plain ones, and excluding only the decryption key instead.