People will sometimes commit secrets to a GitHub repository

Uses Yelp/detect-secrets to look for newly committed secrets. If it finds any potential secrets, it will:

• Fail
• Create a Job Summary with a list of the potential secrets found, and some advice on how to deal with the issue
• Provide an updated secrets baseline that contains the newly added secrets. This is useful if secrets that were discovered are not actually secrets.

First, create a .secrets.baseline in the repo you want to add this action to. For more details on what this file represents, visit the README for Yelp/detect-secrets:

cd PATH_TO_REPOSITORY
pip install detect-secrets[gibberish]==1.2.0
detect-secrets scan > .secrets.baseline
detect-secrets audit .secrets.baseline

Second, add this GitHub action to your workflow or create a new one. A basic workflow would be:

# File: .github/workflows/detect-new-secrets.yml
name: Checking for Secrets
on: push
jobs:
  check-secrets:
    name: Checking for Secrets
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Secret Scanner
        uses: secret-scanner/[email protected]

Often you might have strings that the secret scanner determines are secrets, but are actually harmless. Examples of these might be:

1. Docker tags
2. Git commit SHA's
3. Randomly generated base64 strings

For these cases, it is useful to ignore certain files, lines, or "secrets". You can do this using the files:

• .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_files.patterns
• .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_secrets.patterns
• .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_lines.patterns

While the path defaults to .github/actions/secret-scanner, you can change this with the input exclude_files_path. Blank lines and lines starting with # will be ignored.

On each line, write the regex for the path to the file to ignore. For example:

# File: .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_files.patterns
# Lines starting with the char '#' are ignored
.*-sealed\.json$
\.github/actions/spelling/

will exclude files ending in -sealed.json and everything in the .github/actions/spelling folder

On each line write the regex for a secret you wish to ignore. For example:

# File: .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_secrets.patterns
^SHA256:[A-Fa-f0-9]{64}

On each line write the regex for a line you with to ignore. For example:

# File: .github/actions/secret-scanner/excluded_lines.patterns
^\s+with\s+imageTag\s*=.*$

will exclude the line with imageTag = <ANY_STRING>

You can also pass arguments to detect-secrets directly by using detect-secret-additional-args. For information on the arguments that you can pass, visit Yelp/detect-secrets#filters. For example:

name: Checking for Secrets
on: push
env:
  SCANNER_ARGS: |
      --exclude-files \.github/actions/spelling/.*
      --exclude-lines ^\s+with\s+imageTag\s*=.*$
jobs:
  check-secrets:
    name: Checking for Secrets
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Configuration
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Secret Scanner
        uses: secret-scanner/[email protected]
        with:
          detect_secret_additional_args: ${{ env.SCANNER_ARGS }}

This will ignore everything in .github/actions/spelling/*, and any line that matches the regex ^\s+with\s+imageTag\s*=.*$.