gitleaks/gitleaks

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

28965 stars · 2216 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Gitleaks is an open-source CLI tool for detecting secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repositories, files, directories, and stdin. It integrates with pre-commit hooks and CI/CD pipelines via a GitHub Action and Docker images.

Use cases

• scan a git repo for leaked api keys and passwords
• add secret detection to a pre-commit hook
• run secret scanning in ci pipeline on pull requests
• check a directory of files for hardcoded credentials
• prevent committing tokens to a repository
• audit git history for exposed secrets

When to choose

• you need fast, widely adopted secret scanning for git repos and files
• you want pre-commit or CI/CD integration with a GitHub Action
• you need a single static binary with no dependencies

When to avoid

• you need new features beyond security patches, since gitleaks is feature complete
• you want actively developed alternatives like the successor Betterleaks
• you need runtime or network-level secret detection rather than static scanning

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

security vulnerability-scanning cli ci-cd security developer-tools version-control windows cli cross-platform secret-scanning git dlp devsecops pre-commit api-keys static-analysis devops linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="gitleaks/gitleaks")