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Security best practices

Before creating / modifying any GitHub Actions workflow make sure you're familiar with . Pay special attention to:

In this page we are also providing guidance on how to setup common tooling related to security.

Secrets detection

It is far too easy to accidentally leak secrets on public repositories by inadvertently committing them in variables or configuration files after just doing a quick test during development.

To prevent this kind of issues, it's highly suggested to integrate a solution like Yelp/detect-secrets in the standard development workflow.

First setup

As a prerequisite, install the detect-secrets CLI.

The first step is to create the secrets baseline, that is just a JSON file holding all the settings and references all the potential secrets that have been detected in your codebase with:

detect-secrets scan > .secrets.baseline
git add .secrets.baseline

Then you can start auditing all the detected secrets in your codebase with:

detect-secrets audit .secrets.baseline

For each detected secret, it will ask you if that secret is really meant to be present in the codebase or not:

  • Replying with Yes, will whitelist that entry as a non-secret (is_secret field will be false)
  • Replying with No, will mark that entry as a secret that is meant to be removed in the future (is_secret field will be true)
  • Replying with Skip, will skip to the next secret without marking the current secret (will ask what to do again on the next audit)

Marking each detection as a secret or not is just to make everyone aware that a secret is meant to be there or if an issue that needs to be solved. If you have many non-secrets that get detected but follows a certain pattern, read the exclusion via regex section before proceeding.

At this point you can commit the baseline:

git add .secrets.baseline
git commit -m 'detect-secrets baseline initialized'

Last step is to enable the pre-commit hook in your .pre-commit-config.yaml that will warn when one or more secrets not already present in the baseline are detected:

  - repo: https://github.com/Yelp/detect-secrets
    rev: v1.4.0
    hooks:
      - id: detect-secrets
        args: ["--baseline", ".secrets.baseline"]

Updating new/old secrets to the baseline

To update the current baseline with any new secret or to automatically remove the ones not anymore present:

detect-secrets scan --baseline .secrets.baseline

if you have recently updated detect-secrets, you may want to opt-in for new plugins with --force-use-all-plugins

Run a diff to make sure that everything you expect is there and proceed with auditing and finally committing the update:

git diff
detect-secrets audit .secrets.baseline
git add .secrets.baseline
git commit -m 'detect-secrets baseline updated'

Excluding multiple secrets via regex

It's possible to provide to detect-secrets scan different exclude regex patterns if you have a lot of false positive that you don't want to handle on an individual basis:

  --exclude-lines EXCLUDE_LINES
                        If lines match this regex, it will be ignored.
  --exclude-files EXCLUDE_FILES
                        If filenames match this regex, it will be ignored.
  --exclude-secrets EXCLUDE_SECRETS
                        If secrets match this regex, it will be ignored.

For example, to exclude all files with xyz extension or which path is inside a node_modules folder:

detect-secrets scan --baseline .secrets.baseline --exclude-files '.*\.yml' --exclude-files 'node_modules'

For example, to exclude a dummy/default password that is ok to use:

detect-secrets scan --baseline .secrets.baseline --exclude-secrets 'MyDefaultPassword'

You can check if exclusion are working as expected by inspecting the resulting baseline that should not have anymore references to secrets that are matching at least one exclusion regex.

git diff
git add .secrets.baseline
git commit -m 'Excluding unwanted files in the baseline'

Please also note that when those options are present, they overwrite any previously defined exclusion of the same type in the baseline, i.e. if you want to append an exclusion pattern you need to manually specify again all of them when running detect-secrets scan.