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This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2023-03-15. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Configuring secret scanning for your repositories

In this article

You can configure how GitHub scans your repositories for leaked secrets and generates alerts.

Who can use this feature

People with admin permissions to a repository can enable secret scanning for the repository.

Secret scanning is available for organization-owned repositories in GitHub Enterprise Server if your enterprise has a license for GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About secret scanning" and "About GitHub Advanced Security."

Note: Your site administrator must enable secret scanning for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance before you can use this feature. For more information, see "Configuring secret scanning for your appliance."

Enabling secret scanning

You can enable secret scanning for any repository that is owned by an organization. Once enabled, secret scanning scans for any secrets in your entire Git history on all branches present in your GitHub repository.

You can use the organization settings page for "Code security and analysis" to enable code scanning for all public repositories in an organization:

  1. On your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

    Screenshot of a repository header showing the tabs. The "Settings" tab is highlighted by a dark orange outline.

  3. In the left sidebar, click Security & analysis.

  4. If Advanced Security is not already enabled for the repository, to the right of "GitHub Advanced Security", click Enable.

  5. Review the impact of enabling Advanced Security, then click Enable GitHub Advanced Security for this repository.

  6. When you enable Advanced Security, secret scanning may automatically be enabled for the repository due to the organization's settings. If "Secret scanning" is shown with an Enable button, you still need to enable secret scanning by clicking Enable. If you see a Disable button, secret scanning is already enabled.

    Screenshot of the "Secret scanning" section of the "Code security and analysis" page, with the "Enable" button highlighted in a dark orange outline.

Excluding directories from secret scanning

You can configure a secret_scanning.yml file to exclude directories from secret scanning. For example, you can exclude directories that contain tests or randomly generated content.

  1. On your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Above the list of files, using the Add file drop-down, click Create new file.

  3. In the file name field, type .github/secret_scanning.yml.

  4. Under Edit new file, type paths-ignore: followed by the paths you want to exclude from secret scanning.

    paths-ignore:
  - "foo/bar/*.js"

    You can use special characters, such as * to filter paths. For more information about filter patterns, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions."

    Notes:

    • If there are more than 1,000 entries in paths-ignore, secret scanning will only exclude the first 1,000 directories from scans.
    • If secret_scanning.yml is larger than 1 MB, secret scanning will ignore the entire file.

You can also ignore individual alerts from secret scanning. For more information, see "Managing alerts from secret scanning."

Further reading