Privacy & redaction

Showtail is privacy-first by design:

• Everything is local. All data lives in the .showtail/ folder in your project.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no external API calls. Ever.
• You control what is recorded. Showtail only logs what you explicitly run, unless you enable one of the optional capture integrations.
• Secrets are scrubbed before storage. Showtail makes a best-effort pass to redact provider keys, tokens, passwords, and personal data (email, phone, card, SSN) from captured text before it is written, and the report notes how many it removed. It is a safety net, not a guarantee — still avoid putting secrets in prompts. Tune it under settings.redact in config.json (see Configuration).
• The files are plain and inspectable. They are JSON and JSONL files that you can open in any editor.

Committing .showtail/

Showtail is designed to be committed into your repository so your educator can review it. The project-root .gitignore does not ignore .showtail/.

Showtail writes its own .showtail/.gitignore that excludes only the regenerable, machine-local bits — state.json and reports/. Everything else, including every student's authors/<slug>/ folder and the shared objects/ store, is committed, which is what lets teammates' trails merge through git. (Reports are regenerated with showtail report, so they do not need to be committed.)

Before you commit, remember that your captured prompts become part of your git history. Redaction helps, but do not rely on it — keep passwords, private personal information, and anything you would not want shared out of your prompts while capture is on.

If a project is sensitive, you can add .showtail/ to your project-root .gitignore and share reports another way.