git-secrets VS gitignore

Well, this doesn't really happen at places that don't suck. They had no least privilege access to critical secrets and no processes (like pre-commit hooks using git-secrets) to prevent them being committed.

# macOS brew install git-secrets # Linux git clone https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets.git cd git-secrets make install

You could use Git hooks to prevent someone from being able to author a commit when you suspect there is a secret being committed. In addition to this, you could also perform this check server-side, in case someone did not run their Git hooks for whatever reason. For example, check out git-secrets.

git-secrets

Install git-secrets. Go into each of your repos, scan for past mistakes, and add a git-commit hook:

I agree that code scanning is really important, the best way to convince others is to identify high-risk threats in source code and present them to the decision-makers. For example, scanning Secrets is great for showing how repositories can be a massive vulnerability and identifying some low-hanging fruit, especially in the git history. Attackers are really after git repository access for this reason and there are plenty of open-source or free tools that you can use to illustrate the problem. Git-Secrets, Truffle Hog. These aren't great for a long-term commercial solution, something like GitGuardian is a better commercial tool but if the goal is just to illustrate the problem then finding some high-value secrets with free tools is a good way to convince the security personnel to invest in some solutions. Then the door is open to having more conversations as you have already proven the risk.

I worked for a big startup last year and was on a contract deadline for integrating a vendor framework into a React Native app.

It was taking too long to get a new temp demo license key and GitHub search with clever filters helped me track down a demo key that was recently uploaded to a test repo.

This is also why I use git-secrets in my repos.

https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets

Under the covers, it is simply looking up an 'ignore' list stored in YML during each scan. If you are building your own, you might also want to see how AWS Labs is doing it in their solution git secrets.

In conclusion, the Gitignore repository stands as a testament to the power of collective knowledge and collaboration in software development. By providing a centralized repository of .gitignore templates, it empowers developers to streamline their workflow, maintain cleaner repositories, and focus on what they do best – writing exceptional code. As the software development landscape continues to evolve, the significance of .gitignore templates as indispensable tools for developers is set to endure.

The challenge here was actually from my #48in28 Exercism participation, where I am pretty familiar the standard layout for some repositories since I am familiar with tooling and language, working with new languages does not come with the same familiarity, so I found it made sense to use canonical definitions, hence the use of github/gitignore.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

Here you can find ready-made .gitignore templates for various technologies and languages such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, and many others: https://github.com/github/gitignore/tree/main.

You could also use this git ignore template. Create you .gitignore and add the contents from that file in.

I've only used free Unity with GitHub or GitLab, professionally and reaching back into internships. One recommendation would be to use a slightly longer .gitignore than the default, like this one.

Virtual Environments are a feature that has been part of python itself since version 3.3. It allows you to isolate both a python version and any packages you install with it. Every python project I develop with uses a virtual environment for such isolation purposes. Now I generally like to create these virtual environments inside the target project's directory so I know exactly what it's tied to. If you use GitHub's python gitignore file naming the virtual environment folder as venv or .venv will ensure it doesn't get committed (which you don't want). So I'll make a new project folder and create a virtual environment inside of it:

Especially considering the GitHub .gitignore template for Node only ignores .env.local, not .local.env: https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Node.gitignore...

# Get latest from https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Unity.gitignore