Secret Scanning Belongs in Both CI and Pre-Commit Hooks, Not One or the Other
Security teams often debate whether to run secret scanning in pre-commit hooks or CI pipelines, but experts argue the real question is which layer is currently missing. Pre-commit hooks catch leaked credentials instantly on a developer's local machine, while CI scans act as a mandatory server-side enforcement layer that cannot be skipped. Tools like dotguard can be integrated into CI pipelines with a single command-line step, requiring no tokens, daemons, or version pinning. The scanner flags suspicious patterns and returns a nonzero exit code on findings, causing the build to fail before secrets reach the main branch. False positives are an acknowledged tradeoff, but detailed output including file, line, and matched rule is designed to keep verification time minimal.
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