| name | secret-scan |
| description | Hunt committed secrets with gitleaks and drive safe rotation |
Find committed credentials and get them rotated and removed — without ever exposing them
further yourself.
ABSOLUTE RULE: never print a secret's value — not in output, notes, todo items, commits,
or PRs. Refer to every hit as " in : (commit )".
- Check the tool:
gitleaks version. If it's missing, do NOT skip this scan and do not
stop the review — ask for it with request_tool("gitleaks", …). If the user declines,
or no pinned build exists for their platform, fall back to step 2b and say in your
report that the sweep was manual.
- Scan working tree AND history — history matters most: a secret deleted in HEAD is still
live in every clone, and it is the hit users are most surprised by.
a. With gitleaks:
gitleaks detect --source . --report-format json --report-path /tmp/gitleaks.json
b. Without it, do the same job by hand, and say so:
- working tree:
git grep -nIE '(api[_-]?key|secret|token|password|BEGIN [A-Z ]*PRIVATE KEY|AKIA[0-9A-Z]{16}|sk_(live|test)_[0-9a-zA-Z]{16,}|xox[baprs]-)'
- history, including files deleted since:
git log -p --all -S 'AKIA' --pickaxe-all
and git log --diff-filter=D --name-only --pretty=format:%h -- '*.env*' '*credential*' '*secret*',
then read the removed contents with git show <sha>^:<path>.
- Pipe anything you read through a redactor rather than into your transcript, e.g.
sed -E "s/[A-Za-z0-9_\\-]{16,}/[REDACTED]/g" — the no-printing rule still applies.
- Triage each hit by reading its context:
- Real credential, test fixture, or example placeholder? Say which and why.
- For real ones: what does it grant access to, and is it plausibly still valid?
- For every real secret, in this order:
a. ROTATE first — tell the user exactly where to revoke/rotate it (the provider's
console page or CLI command). Rotation beats removal: history rewrite without
rotation is false comfort.
b. Remove it from the code: move to env vars or the project's secret store, matching
how this codebase already handles configuration.
c. Prevent recurrence: add/extend
.gitignore for local secret files and offer a
.gitleaks.toml baseline plus a pre-commit hook.
d. History purge (git filter-repo/BFG) is DESTRUCTIVE and rewrites shared history —
describe the trade-off and only proceed if the user explicitly asks.
- Deliver: a hit list (kind · location · verdict · rotation status), the cleanup
branch/PR, and the prevention setup you added or recommend.