secrets-hunter 0.6.0

Detect secrets and sensitive information in your codebase

Secrets Hunter

Secrets Hunter is a lightweight, fully autonomous, and dependency-free scanner that detects secrets and sensitive information in your codebase.

The scanner provides a command-line interface (CLI) and is designed for use both locally (as a linter) and in security pipelines (as a security gate).

Features

Findings are detected using a combined regex and entropy approach:

• Pattern-based detection: Identifies predefined secret formats (API keys, tokens, etc.)
• Entropy-based detection: Finds high-entropy strings

Each high-entropy finding gets a confidence boost if it is detected in the context of an assignment or key/value pair with keywords, assuming a secret (e.g., API_KEY=..., "secret_token": "...", etc.).

All of these patterns are fully configurable via TOML config overlays (see Configuration).

Secrets Hunter supports parallel scanning with configurable workers. Output findings can be displayed in console output or exported to a JSON file.

Installation

Requirements: Python 3.11+

Secrets Hunter can be installed via PyPI, from source, or using Docker. For a quick start, install directly from PyPI:

pip install secrets-hunter

For installation from source or Docker, see the Installation docs.

Quick start

Scan the current directory:

secrets-hunter .

Findings are masked by default. To reveal them, use the --reveal-findings flag:

secrets-hunter . --reveal-findings

Scan a specific file:

secrets-hunter path/to/file.py

Export results to JSON:

secrets-hunter . --json results.json

See the Usage docs for all flags and more examples.

Configuration

Secrets Hunter ships with built-in packaged defaults. You can display them using CLI:

secrets-hunter showconfig

Configuration can be customized using overlay config files. Example (team baseline overlay):

secrets-hunter . --config team.toml

Multiple overlays are applied in the order provided:

secrets-hunter . --config ci.toml --config local.toml

A full description and usage examples are available in Configuration docs.

License

Secrets Hunter is released under the MIT License, meaning you are free to use, modify, and distribute it for both personal and commercial purposes.

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by whitespots.io.

Special thanks to @Shandriuk for implementing the end-to-end functional testing suite.