One of the things you certainly want to avoid as a developer is accidently checking in secrets(passwords, api keys, ...) in your code repository. Such a credential leak can have severe consequences and is something you certainly want to avoid.
If you are using GitHub as your source repository and you have a public repository, I have some good news for you. Since December last year, Github made secret scanning available for free for all public repositories.
It is not enabled out-of-the-box but easy to configure and get up and running for you repo. Let me show you...
Enable Secret scanning for your public Github repository.
- Browse to your public repository in Github and click on the Security tab.
- Click on Secret Scanning on the Security page.
- Click on the link to the Repository settings to bring you to the correct setting on the Settings page.
- At the bottom of the page, click on the Enable button in the Secret scanning section.
- That’s it!
Now every time when you push a commit to this repository, Github will scan the content of those commits for secrets. If secret scanning detects a secret, GitHub generates an alert that is send to the repository administrators and organization owners..
You can also check if secrets are found in the following way:
- Go back to the Security page and click on Secret Scanning on the left or bView Detected Secrets.
- On the Secret Scanning page, you can see any secret that is detected.
More information: About secret scanning - GitHub Docs