I Ran Gitleaks Against My Own Repo and Found 12 Real Secrets
Originally published at woitzik.dev I assumed my homelab repo was clean. No one had ever flagged anything in review (there is no one else reviewing it), CI was green, and I generally try to use Vault and ExternalSecrets for anything sensitive. Then I ran a full-history gitleaks detect against it. It found 12 distinct secrets committed in plaintext — including the OIDC private key that signs SSO tokens for half the cluster. This is the scanning setup I put in place afterward, the baseline strategy that let me adopt secret scanning without getting blocked by my own history on every commit, and the remediation plan for the leaks themselves. View the complete homelab infrastructure source on GitHub 🐙 What Gitleaks Found gitleaks detect --no-banner -v Twelve real findings, plus one already-hashed password (lower severity but still shouldn't be hand-committed) and one false positive in ROADMAP.md (documentation text that happened to match a generic API key pattern). The real findings, by severity: File Secret Why It Matters kubernetes/apps/authelia/configmap.yml OIDC issuer private key Signs SSO tokens for ArgoCD, Vault, Grafana — highest blast radius kubernetes/apps/garage/config.yml RPC secret + admin token Storage backend for Velero/Loki/CNPG backups kubernetes/apps/garage/secrets.yml Admin token (duplicate) Same secret committed twice in two files terraform/stacks/network/local_backend.hcl Garage S3 access key This is the Terraform state backend's own credential kubernetes/system/postgres/cnpg-backup-secret.yml Garage S3 secret key Used for WAL archiving kubernetes/apps/paperless/secrets.yml Postgres password + AI API token kubernetes/apps/cloudflared/secrets.yml Cloudflare Tunnel token kubernetes/apps/headscale/config.yml OIDC client secret Must match Authelia's client config kubernetes/system/monitoring/loki.yml Minio/S3 password kubernetes/apps/mikrodash/secrets.yml Dashboard password Lowest priority — internal tool only None of these were exposed by a public repo