What is GitLeaks and where does it fit in a DevSecOps pipeline?

Describe GitLeaks by the failure it prevents, not by its feature list. It belongs to secrets scanning and runs at the every stage stage of delivery, which matters because the cost of fixing a defect rises sharply the later it is found — the core argument behind shifting security left.

Strong answers cover detect vs protect modes, scanning full git history vs staged changes, custom regex and entropy rules, .gitleaksignore and allowlists, pre-commit hooks, and what to do after a real key leaks (rotate first, rewrite history second). Interviewers also listen for the operational side: who owns the rules, how findings reach the developer who introduced them, how false positives get suppressed without silently disabling coverage, and what the break-glass path is when a fix genuinely cannot ship in time.

Tie it to the wider toolchain. Security scanning is only useful when its output is actionable, deduplicated across tools, and attached to a specific commit, image digest or resource — otherwise teams learn to ignore it.