Stop Committing Secrets: A Practical Guide to Pre-Commit Secret Detection

You’ve done it. Or someone on your team has. A .env file slips into a commit, an AWS key ends up in a config file, a GitLab token gets hardcoded in a script “just for testing”. A few minutes later it’s in your git history — forever.

This post covers the current best practice for catching secrets before they ever touch your repository, without drowning your team in false positives.

Working across large repositories that mix multiple technologies is common in modern software teams. Keeping everyone aligned on the same tool versions, environment variables, and runtimes has always been a friction point — until I started using Mise (mise-en-place).

It has since replaced several tools on my machine (goodbye nvm, reduced Homebrew usage) and become my go-to for managing development environments, both locally and in CI.

When your Go project depends on an internal library living in a private GitLab repository, a plain go get will fail — GitLab doesn’t know who is asking, and Go doesn’t know the repository is private. Fortunately, a handful of configuration steps sorts everything out, both locally and in CI.