betterleaks

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for betterleaks

Find leaked secrets everywhere.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's Betterleaks image is comparable to the upstream ghcr.io/betterleaks/betterleaks image and uses the same betterleaks entrypoint and / working directory. Betterleaks is a Go-based secrets scanner maintained by the creators of Gitleaks, licensed under MIT. It differs from the upstream image in the following ways:

• The image runs as the nonroot user (UID 65532) by default, while the upstream image runs as root. Mounted repositories and directories must be readable by UID 65532. The working directory / is not writable, so a relative --report-path such as findings.json fails; write reports to a mounted directory writable by UID 65532 (for example --report-path /repo/findings.json), or run with --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" so the container matches the owner of the host directory.
• The upstream image runs git config --global --add safe.directory '*' at build time, but Betterleaks runs git with GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL=/dev/null, so that setting is ignored and upstream git scans of a repository owned by a different user fail with detected dubious ownership. This image sets safe.directory=* through the GIT_CONFIG_COUNT, GIT_CONFIG_KEY_0, and GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_0 environment variables, which Betterleaks passes through to git, so these scans succeed. If you set your own GIT_CONFIG_COUNT variables, include safe.directory=* in them.
• The image includes git and openssh-client but no shell. Run betterleaks subcommands directly, or use the -dev variant if you need a shell for pre-commit style pipelines or debugging.

Getting Started

The image entrypoint is betterleaks, so pass subcommands and flags directly. Confirm the image runs:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest version

Scan the git history of the repository in the current directory:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/repo cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest git /repo

Scan a directory or file without git history:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/scan cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest dir /scan

Scan content piped through stdin and print a JSON report to stdout:

echo 'github_token = ghp_wWPw5k4aXcaajCqbDsLRnJZZzVLgLO0M1234' | \
  docker run --rm -i cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest \
  stdin --report-format json --report-path -

Betterleaks exits with status 1 when it finds a leak, which makes it suitable as a CI gate.

Configuration

Betterleaks reads its rules from a TOML file compatible with the Gitleaks format. Mount a custom configuration and point Betterleaks at it with --config:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/repo cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/betterleaks:latest \
  git /repo --config /repo/.betterleaks.toml

Documentation and Resources

• Betterleaks project and documentation

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.