How to Remove Secrets From Logs Before Sharing

Quick answer

Use this guide before sharing logs with AI, support, GitHub issues, Slack, Jira, or email. The goal is to remove secrets and private details while keeping the useful debugging context readable.

Who this is for

• Developers preparing logs for AI debugging
• Support teams opening vendor tickets
• QA engineers posting reproducible issues
• Team members sharing production incident context

What to remove first

• Secrets: API keys, bearer tokens, JWTs, cookies, session IDs, passwords, and auth headers.
• People and customer details: emails, phone numbers, customer IDs, account IDs, and request IDs.
• Internal system details: hostnames, private URLs, tenant names, workspace IDs, and local file paths.

What to keep

• Error message
• Status code
• Timestamp
• Stack trace line names
• Safe placeholders such as [EMAIL], [JWT], [LOCAL_PATH], and [URL]

What each important control does

• Sample buttons: Show safe example logs so users can understand the workflow before pasting their own text.
• Upload file: Loads .log, .txt, or .json files into the browser editor.
• Clear input: Removes the current text and starts again with a clean workspace.
• Cleaning strength: Readable keeps debug context easy to understand; Strict hides more for public sharing.
• Choose what to hide: Lets users turn hide types on or off for their situation.
• Custom fields to hide: Saves private team names, tenant IDs, workspace IDs, emails, or regex patterns.
• Import custom rules: Brings saved hide rules into another browser or device.
• Export custom rules: Downloads only custom rules. It does not include the pasted log.
• Copy and download: Lets users take the reviewed cleaned output into the next workflow.
• Fullscreen: Gives more room to review long logs.

Step-by-step

1. 1Paste or upload the log into the tool.
2. 2Load a sample first if you want to understand the workflow.
3. 3Review the sensitive item summary.
4. 4Adjust cleaning strength and hide options.
5. 5Add custom fields for private team names, tenants, workspace IDs, or repeated patterns.
6. 6Copy or download the cleaned output only after review.

Example

Before:
Authorization: Bearer eyJ...
email=jane@example.com
path=/Users/jane/app/error.log
status=504

After:
Authorization: Bearer [JWT]
email=[EMAIL]
path=[LOCAL_PATH]
status=504

After a real secret is found

• Rotate or revoke the exposed key, token, password, or cookie.
• Avoid relying only on deleting the shared message.
• Keep a cleaned copy for tickets and debugging notes.

Tip: Keep the cleaned copy focused on timestamps, status codes, error messages, and stack frames.