Keeping secrets secure with secret scanning
Let GitHub do the hard work of ensuring that tokens, private keys, and other code secrets are not exposed in your repository.
Who can use this feature?
Secret scanning alerts for partners runs automatically on public repositories and public npm packages to notify service providers about leaked secrets on GitHub.
Secret scanning alerts for users are available for public repositories for free. Organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud with a license for GitHub Advanced Security can also enable secret scanning alerts for users on their private and internal repositories. For more information, see "
About secret scanning
" and "
About GitHub Advanced Security
."
For information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise with GitHub Advanced Security for free, see "
Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud
" and "
Setting up a trial of GitHub Advanced Security
" in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.
GitHub scans repositories for known types of secrets, to prevent fraudulent use of secrets that were committed accidentally.
As a service provider, you can partner with GitHub to have your secret token formats secured through secret scanning, which searches for accidental commits of your secret format and can be sent to a service provider's verify endpoint.
You can configure how GitHub scans your repositories for leaked secrets and generates alerts.
You can define your own custom patterns to extend the capabilities of secret scanning by generating one or more regular expressions for each pattern, using the regular expression generator.
You can view, evaluate and resolve alerts for secrets checked in to your repository.
Lists of supported secrets and the partners that GitHub works with to prevent fraudulent use of secrets that were committed accidentally.
Learn how secret scanning uses AI to scan and create alerts for unstructured secrets, such as passwords.
With push protection for repositories and organizations, secret scanning blocks contributors from pushing secrets to a repository and generates an alert whenever a contributor bypasses the block.
With push protection for users, you are automatically protected on all pushes to public repositories across GitHub.
Push protection proactively secures you against leaked secrets in your repositories by blocking pushes containing secrets. To push a commit containing a secret, you must specify a reason for bypassing the block.
Push protection proactively protects you against leaked secrets in your repositories. You can resolve blocked pushes and, once the detected secret is removed, you can push changes to your working branch from the command line or the web UI.
If you have problems with secret scanning, you can use these tips to help resolve issues.
