Talisman

What Talisman is

Talisman is a Git security tool that installs hooks to check outgoing changes for potential secrets before they leave a developer’s workstation. It supports pre-commit and pre-push checks, or can run as a standalone executable. Its detectors look for encoded values, file contents and sizes, high-entropy content, possible credit card numbers, and filenames or extensions. The CLI can also scan Git history for secrets that may already have been checked in and save report files. When a potential issue is found, Talisman displays a report describing the affected file and errors. A `.talismanrc` file supports ignored files, allowed patterns, custom search patterns, and detector severity settings. Installation options include a global Git hook template and CLI utility, a hook for one repository, or a standalone executable. Talisman is free, open-source software distributed under the MIT license, and supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its documentation describes use with the pre-commit framework and Husky. The tool cannot detect secrets introduced through a forced push; interactive ignore-file setup is limited to non-Windows users.