I'm using Heroku to host a Rails app, which means using Git to deploy to Heroku. Because of the "pure Git workflow" on Heroku, anything that needs to go upstream to the server has to be configured identically on my local box.

However I need to have certain configuration files be different depending on whether I'm in the local setup or deployed on Heroku. Again, because of the deployment method Heroku uses I can't use .gitignore and a template (as I have seen suggested many times, and have used in other projects).

What I need is for git to somehow track changes on a file, but selectively tell git not to override certain files when pulling from a particular repo -- basically to make certain changes one-way only.

Can this be done? I'd appreciate any suggestions!