Gitleaks is a command-line secret detection tool written in Go that scans for sensitive information like API keys, tokens, and passwords in git repositories, directories, files, and stdin. It features a modular architecture with separate components for configuration loading, source abstraction (file/git/archive handling), detection logic with multi-layer decoding, rule-based matching, and flexible reporting. The tool uses a Cobra-based CLI interface with commands for different scan modes and supports output formats including JSON, CSV, JUnit, SARIF, and custom templates. Key strengths include its pluggable decoder pipeline for handling encoded secrets, configurable rule system with entropy checks and keyword filtering, and sophisticated allowlist mechanism for reducing false positives. While actively maintained for security patches, the project is feature-complete with ongoing dependency management challenges due to its extensive rule set and reliance on unstable packages like golang.org/x/exp.