At my new job there is a C# website which relies on a secrets.xml file which is not in the version control repository. It contains links to databases and passwords. You need to copy it into the root directory manually.
Unfortunately, the existence of this secret file was not properly documented and I set up my solution without it. Worse, the solution builds and runs without it, and the website displays only a generic error when it needs to use the missing file, leading to developer misery.
Main question:
- How can I ensure that the build breaks if the file is missing, so it's immediately clear what the problem is?
Follow-up questions:
- What could be the rationale for not having the file in version control?
- Is there a better way to achieve the objective in 2. than leaving it out of version control?