Secrets-LE: Zero Hassle Secret Detection

Find hardcoded credentials across your workspace, then redact them in place
API keys, tokens, passwords, private keys — 100% local, nothing leaves your machine

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a workspace, press Ctrl+Alt+S (Cmd+Alt+S on Mac), and every detected secret lands in a results document — grouped by file, with line/column positions pointing at the value itself. Run Secrets-LE: Sanitize Secrets to replace the secrets in the active file with a placeholder. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

Detection is regex-based over the full text of each file, so it works on any text format — code, configs, .env files, YAML, JSON, logs. It is a pre-commit safety net, not a guarantee: a scanner built on patterns can miss secrets and can flag non-secrets. Review the results.

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

detect_secrets(content, sensitivity?, includeApiKeys?, includePasswords?, includeTokens?, includePrivateKeys?, maxResults?)

Reports each finding by type, confidence, key name and 1-based position. Values are never returned — previews are truncated and length-annotated, and the context line has the secret masked out, so a finding can be located without the credential leaving the machine it was found on.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as secrets-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/secrets-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "secrets-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "secrets-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g secrets-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "secrets-le": { "command": "secrets-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y secrets-le-mcp

The CLI

The same detection runs from a terminal or a CI step: a Rust CLI in crate/, sharing one pattern table with the extension — crate/signatures/patterns.toml — so the two can never disagree about what counts as a credential.

secrets-le .                        # scan a tree
secrets-le --sensitivity high .     # only high-confidence findings
secrets-le --no-ignore --hidden .   # reach .env and everything git ignores
secrets-le mcp                      # the same detection over MCP on stdio

The exit code is the answer: 0 nothing found · 1 findings · 2 the question was malformed — so secrets-le . is a CI step as it stands.

It never prints a credential. A scanner's output goes into a CI log, which is archived, often world-readable, and outlives the secret; a scanner that printed what it found would disclose it more widely than the commit would have. Previews are capped at eight characters and at half the value's length, context lines are masked, and there is no flag that changes either. The extension is the half that can fix what it finds; the binary only reports.

What gets detected

Thirty-four patterns, in crate/signatures/patterns.toml — the one table both frontends load.

Key-based patterns accept quoted and unquoted keys, so JSON ("apiKey": "…"), YAML (api_key: …), env (API_KEY=…), and code (apiKey = '…') all match.

Intentional non-detections: template placeholders (${VAR}, {{var}}, <your-key>, xxxxxxxx), version numbers and hostnames that merely look dotted (1.2.3 is not a JWT), GCP project ids (identifiers, not credentials), and database URLs without embedded credentials.

Known limitations: detection is pattern-based — obfuscated, split, or unconventionally named secrets are missed; JWTs whose header isn't standard base64 JSON (eyJ…) are missed; a high-entropy string without a recognizable key name or prefix is not reported.

Commands

Settings

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)

Both halves are covered — the manifest (command titles, setting names and descriptions) and everything shown while the extension runs (notifications, the status bar, quick-picks and prompts). The extension follows VS Code's display language, so it matches whatever the editor is already set to; no setting of its own.

Privacy & security

• No network access. The extension never sends data anywhere. The telemetryEnabled setting only writes events to a local Output Channel you can inspect (Secrets-LE Telemetry).
• The MCP server never returns a secret. Its output goes to whatever model called it, so previews are truncated and length-annotated and the surrounding context line is masked, using the same utils/mask helpers as the report. There is no argument that turns this off, and the bundle gate fails the build if a value ever appears in a response — verified by making the tool leak on purpose and watching the gate catch it.
• Error notifications redact home directories and credential-shaped fragments before display.
• Sanitize always asks for confirmation before editing your file, and edits are normal undo-able document edits.

Documentation

Performance

Median of 7 runs after warmup, on Apple M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM, Node 24.3.0. Inputs are generated by scripts/benchmark.ts rather than checked in, so the sizes above are exactly what was measured. Reproduce with bun run benchmark.

These are machine-specific and are not asserted in CI — a benchmark that gates a build only tells you how busy the runner was.

Testing

248 test cases across 15 files, plus an integration suite that runs in a real VS Code extension host and an end-to-end test that installs the built .vsix into a clean profile.

Generated from a real run — coverage/coverage-summary.json and coverage/test-results.json — by scripts/coverage-readme.js; CI fails if this section drifts. Reproduce with bun run test:coverage, and the case count is the one vitest prints.

More from the LE family

Sixteen single-purpose tools for the work in front of every model. Each ships a Rust CLI and an MCP server. One page: letools.dev

Get it out

• String-LE — Extract every string in a codebase, with its position, so a person can read them
• Numbers-LE — Extract every hardcoded number in a codebase, so a person can check them
• Units-LE — Extract every quantity with its unit, normalized, and refuse the ambiguous ones by name
• Dates-LE — Extract every date and timestamp, and the exact instant each one resolves to
• IDs-LE — Extract every UUID, ULID, NanoID, ObjectId and Snowflake, and decode the time inside
• IPs-LE — Extract every IP address, CIDR block and MAC, normalized and classified by scope
• URLs-LE — Extract every URL in a codebase, with its protocol and exact position
• Paths-LE — Extract every file path in a codebase, and say whether it still points at anything
• Colors-LE — Extract every color in a codebase, and say which ones are not in your palette

Check it

• Regex-LE — Find every regex in a codebase, and report which can be driven into catastrophic backtracking
• Versions-LE — Find where one dependency is constrained differently across a repository's manifests
• i18n-LE — Identify the i18n library a project uses, then audit its catalogs by that library's rules
• Scrape-LE — Check whether a page is scrapeable before the scraper is written, and say when it cannot tell

Guard it

• Secrets-LE — Find hardcoded credentials in a codebase, and never print one into the report
• EnvSync-LE — Compare the dotenv files in a tree, and say which keys are missing from which
• Unicode-LE — Find the Unicode that hides meaning — bidi controls, invisibles, homoglyphs, mixed scripts

Each stands on its own: no shared crate, no published core. Where two of them agree, it is because the same answer was right twice.

Contact — nolindnaidoo.com · GitHub · LinkedIn

Also by nolindnaidoo

Rust — pixelcoords and pixelactions are one loop: pixelcoords answers where, pixelactions acts there. Their own tools, their own voice — not part of the LE family.

• pixelcoords — Freeze your screen, mark regions, get pixel-exact coordinates and crops pixelcoords.dev · crates.io · docs.rs
• pixelactions — Consume human-verified coordinates, perform the interaction, confirm it landed pixelactions.dev · crates.io · docs.rs

License

MIT © nolindnaidoo