Avoid accidental secret commit to GitHub

Recently I encountered a situation where I accidentally left a personal api-key secret in one of my GitHub repository codebase, which I forgot to remove after running my local tests to verify my code changes. And since the changes that I committed were related to some local testing that I was doing, right after running the unit tests, I decided to directly run the following :

git add <filename>
git commit -m ‘my commit message’ …

github ibm ibm cloud secret security