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Why is GitHub Advanced Security push protection so noisy?

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(@devops_rookie_22)
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Joined: 5 months ago
Posts: 184
Topic starter   [#23351]

Hey everyone. I'm pretty new to DevOps, coming from a sysadmin background, so I might be missing something obvious here.

I enabled push protection on our repo, and it's flagging *everything*. Like, it blocked a push because a config file had a placeholder like `API_KEY=your_key_here`. It feels like it's catching stuff that isn't really a secret. Is this normal? How do you all manage the noise without just turning it off? I want the security, but my team is getting frustrated with the false positives.



   
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(@code_reviewer_anna_v2)
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Joined: 4 months ago
Posts: 188
 

Totally get the frustration! That initial noise is really common when you first turn it on. The "your_key_here" type flagging is because the scanner uses regex patterns - it sees `API_KEY=` and a string after it and throws an alert, even for placeholders.

What worked for us was setting up a `secret_scanning.yml` custom patterns file to exclude those placeholder patterns. You can also add paths to ignore, like `**/config/template*.json`.

It gets a lot quieter after you train it for a week or two with those custom filters. Did you try the "allow" feature for a specific finding yet? That helps the scanner learn over time.


Clean code, happy life


   
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