One does not commit or compile credentials
Context:
This meme was brought to you by the PyPI Director of Infrastructure who accidentally hardcoded credentials - which could have resulted in compromissing the entire core Python ecosystem.
At my workplace, we use the string to designate code that shouldn’t be checked in. Usually in a comment:
// @nocommit temporary for testing
apiKey = 'blah';
// apiKey = getKeyFromKeychain();
but it can be anywhere in the file.
There’s a lint rule that looks for in all modified files. It shows a lint error in dev and in our code review / build system, and commits that contain
anywhere are completely blocked from being merged.
(the code in the lint rule does something like "@no"+"commit"
to avoid triggering itself)
This sounds like a really useful solution, how do you implement something like this? Especially with linter integration
Depending on which stack you’re using, you could use https://danger.systems to automatically fail PRs.
PRs? Isn’t the point of that something does not get committed, and therefore no credentials are stored in the git repository? Even if the PR does not get merged, the file is still stored as a hit object and can be restored.
At my workplace, we use the string @nocommit to designate code that shouldn’t be checked in
That approach seems useful but it wouldn’t have prevented the PyPI incident OP links to: the access token was temporarily entered in a .py
python source file, but it was not committed to git. The leak was via .pyc
compiled python files which made it into a published docker build.
Yeah, but a combination of this approach, and adding all compiled file types including .pyc to .gitignore would fix it.
Neat idea. This could be refined by adding a git hook that runs (rip)grep on the entire codebase and fails if anything is found upon commit may accomplish a similar result and stop the code from being committed entirely. Requires a bit more setup work on de developers end, though.
Would a git hook block you from committing it locally, or would it just run on the server side?
I’m not sure how our one at work is implemented, but we can actually commit files in our local repo, and push them into the code review system. We just can’t merge any changes that contain it.
It’s used for common workflows like creating new database entities. During development, the ORM system creates a dev database on a test DB cluster and automatically points the code for the new table to it, with a comment above it. When the code is approved, the new schema is pushed to prod and the code is updated to point to the real DB.
Also, the codebase is way too large for something like ripgrep to search the whole codebase in a reasonable time, which is why it only searches the commit diffs themselves.