Configuration

tartufo has a wide variety of options to customize its operation available on the command line. Some of these options, however, can be a bit unwieldy and lead to an overly cumbersome command. It also becomes difficult to reliably reproduce the same command in all environments when done this way.

To help with these problems, tartufo can also be configured by way of a configuration file! You can tell tartufo what config file to use, or, it will automatically discover one for you. Starting in the current working directory, and traversing backward up the directory tree, it will search for both a tartufo.toml and a pyproject.toml. The latter is searched for as a matter of convenience for Python projects, such as tartufo itself. For an example of the tree traversal, let’s say you running tartufo from the directory /home/my_user/projects/my_project. tartufo will look for the configuration files first in this directory, then in /home/my_user/projects/, then in /home/my_user, etc.

Within these files, tartufo will look for a section labeled [tool.tartufo] to find its configuration, and will load all items from there just as though they had been specified on the command line. This file must be written in the TOML format, which should look mostly familiar if you have dealt with any other configuration file format before.

All command line options can be specified in the configuration file, with or without the leading dashes, and using either dashes or underscores for word separators. When the configuration is read in, this will all be normalized automatically. For example, the configuration for tartufo itself looks like this:

[tool.tartufo]
repo-path = "."
json = false
regex = true
entropy = true
exclude-path-patterns = [
    'poetry.lock',
    # To not have to escape `\` in regexes, use single quoted
    # TOML 'literal strings'
    'docs/source/(.*)\.rst',
]
exclude-signatures = [
    "62f22e4500140a6ed959a6143c52b0e81c74e7491081292fce733de4ec574542",
    "ecbbe1edd6373c7e2b88b65d24d7fe84610faafd1bc2cf6ae35b43a77183e80b",
]

Note that all options specified in a configuration file are treated as defaults, and will be overridden by any options specified on the command line.

For a full list of available command line options, check out the Usage document.

Configuration File Exclusive Options

New in version 3.0.

As of version 3.0, we have added several configuration options which are available only in the configuration file. This is due to the nature of their construction, and the fact that they would be exceedingly difficult to represent on the command line.

Rule Patterns

New in version 3.0.

tartufo comes bundled with a number of regular expression rules that it will check your code for by default. If you would like to scan for additional regular expressions, you may add them to your configuration with the rule-patterns directive. This directive utilizes a TOML array of tables, and thus can take one of two forms:

Option 1: Keeping it contained in your [tool.tartufo] table.

[tool.tartufo]
rule-patterns = [
    {reason = "RSA private key 2", pattern = "-----BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY-----"},
    {reason = "Null characters in GitHub Workflows", pattern = '\0', path-pattern = '\.github/workflows/(.*)\.yml'}
]

Option 2: Separating each rule out into its own table.

[[tool.tartufo.rule-patterns]]
reason = "RSA private key 2"
pattern = "-----BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY-----"

[[tool.tartufo.rule-patterns]]
reason = "Null characters in GitHub Workflows"
pattern = '\0'
path-pattern = '\.github/workflows/(.*)\.yml'

Note

There are 3 different keys used here: reason, pattern, and path-pattern. Only reason and pattern are required. If no path-pattern is specified, then the pattern will be used to scan against all files.