Is gitleaks free to use?

gitleaks is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does gitleaks do?

Find secrets with Gitleaks 🔑

What is gitleaks written in?

gitleaks is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks, and it has 29,364 GitHub stars.

gitleaks: Open Source Orchestration & Scheduling

Gitleaks

┌─○───┐
│ │╲  │
│ │ ○ │
│ ○ ░ │
└─░───┘

[!WARNING] Gitleaks is feature complete. I'm not merging new features into Gitleaks. Future releases will be security patches only. I'm shifting my focus to Betterleaks

Gitleaks is a tool for detecting secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repos, files, and whatever else you wanna throw at it via stdin. If you wanna learn more about how the detection engine works check out this blog: Regex is (almost) all you need.

➜  ~/code(master) gitleaks git -v

    ○
    │╲
    │ ○
    ○ ░
    ░    gitleaks


Finding:     "export BUNDLE_ENTERPRISE__CONTRIBSYS__COM=cafebabe:deadbeef",
Secret:      cafebabe:deadbeef
RuleID:      sidekiq-secret
Entropy:     2.609850
File:        cmd/generate/config/rules/sidekiq.go
Line:        23
Commit:      cd5226711335c68be1e720b318b7bc3135a30eb2
Author:      John
Email:       [email protected]
Date:        2022-08-03T12:31:40Z
Fingerprint: cd5226711335c68be1e720b318b7bc3135a30eb2:cmd/generate/config/rules/sidekiq.go:sidekiq-secret:23

Getting Started

Gitleaks can be installed using Homebrew, Docker, or Go. Gitleaks is also available in binary form for many popular platforms and OS types on the releases page. In addition, Gitleaks can be implemented as a pre-commit hook directly in your repo or as a GitHub action using Gitleaks-Action.

Installing

# MacOS
brew install gitleaks

# Docker (DockerHub)
docker pull zricethezav/gitleaks:latest
docker run -v ${path_to_host_folder_to_scan}:/path zricethezav/gitleaks:latest [COMMAND] [OPTIONS] [SOURCE_PATH]

# Docker (ghcr.io)
docker pull ghcr.io/gitleaks/gitleaks:latest
docker run -v ${path_to_host_folder_to_scan}:/path ghcr.io/gitleaks/gitleaks:latest [COMMAND] [OPTIONS] [SOURCE_PATH]

# From Source (make sure `go` is installed)
git clone https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks.git
cd gitleaks
make build

Pre-Commit

Install pre-commit from https://pre-commit.com/#install
Create a .pre-commit-config.yaml file at the root of your repository with the following content:
```
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks
    rev: v8.24.2
    hooks:
      - id: gitleaks
```
for a native execution of gitleaks or use the gitleaks-docker pre-commit ID for executing gitleaks using the official Docker images
Auto-update the config to the latest repos' versions by executing pre-commit autoupdate
Install with pre-commit install
Now you're all set!

➜ git commit -m "this commit contains a secret"
Detect hardcoded secrets.................................................Failed

Note: to disable the gitleaks pre-commit hook you can prepend SKIP=gitleaks to the commit command and it will skip running gitleaks

➜ SKIP=gitleaks git commit -m "skip gitleaks check"
Detect hardcoded secrets................................................Skipped

Usage

Gitleaks scans code, past or present, for secrets

Usage:
  gitleaks [command]

Available Commands:
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  dir         scan directories or files for secrets
  git         scan git repositories for secrets
  help        Help about any command
  stdin       detect secrets from stdin
  version     display gitleaks version

Flags:
  -b, --baseline-path string          path to baseline with issues that can be ignored
  -c, --config string                 config file path
                                      order of precedence:
                                      1. --config/-c
                                      2. env var GITLEAKS_CONFIG
                                      3. env var GITLEAKS_CONFIG_TOML with the file content
                                      4. (target path)/.gitleaks.toml
                                      If none of the four options are used, then gitleaks will use the default config
      --diagnostics string            enable diagnostics (http OR comma-separated list: cpu,mem,trace). cpu=CPU prof, mem=memory prof, trace=exec tracing, http=serve via net/http/pprof
      --diagnostics-dir string        directory to store diagnostics output files when not using http mode (defaults to current directory)
      --enable-rule strings           only enable specific rules by id
      --exit-code int                 exit code when leaks have been encountered (default 1)
  -i, --gitleaks-ignore-path string   path to .gitleaksignore file or folder containing one (default ".")
  -h, --help                          help for gitleaks
      --ignore-gitleaks-allow         ignore gitleaks:allow comments
  -l, --log-level string              log level (trace, debug, info, warn, error, fatal) (default "info")
      --max-archive-depth int         allow scanning into nested archives up to this depth (default "0", no archive traversal is done)
      --max-decode-depth int          allow recursive decoding up to this depth (default "0", no decoding is done)
      --max-target-megabytes int      files larger than this will be skipped
      --no-banner                     suppress banner
      --no-color                      turn off color for verbose output
      --redact uint[=100]             redact secrets from logs and stdout. To redact only parts of the secret just apply a percent value from 0..100. For example --redact=20 (default 100%)
  -f, --report-format string          output format (json, csv, junit, sarif, template)
  -r, --report-path string            report file
      --report-template string        template file used to generate the report (implies --report-format=template)
      --timeout int                   set a timeout for gitleaks commands in seconds (default "0", no timeout is set)
  -v, --verbose                       show verbose output from scan
      --version                       version for gitleaks

Use "gitleaks [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Commands

⚠️ v8.19.0 introduced a change that deprecated detect and protect. Those commands are still available but are hidden in the --help menu. Take a look at this gist for easy command translations. If you find v8.19.0 broke an existing command (detect/protect), please open an issue.

There are three scanning modes: git, dir, and stdin.

Git

The git command lets you scan local git repos. Under the hood, gitleaks uses the git log -p command to scan patches. You can configure the behavior of git log -p with the log-opts option. For example, if you wanted to run gitleaks on a range of commits you could use the following command: gitleaks git -v --log-opts="--all commitA..commitB" path_to_repo. See the git log documentation for more information. If there is no target specified as a positional argument, then gitleaks will attempt to scan the current working directory as a git repo.

Dir

The dir (aliases include files, directory) command lets you scan directories and files. Example: gitleaks dir -v path_to_directory_or_file. If there is no target specified as a positional argument, then gitleaks will scan the current working directory.

Stdin

You can also stream data to gitleaks with the stdin command. Example: cat some_file | gitleaks -v stdin

Creating a baseline

When scanning large repositories or repositories with a long history, it

What is gitleaks?

What it is

Key capabilities

Who uses it and how

Getting started

How it compares

When to use it — and when not to