agent failed to finish the full-history scan: trufflehog timed out with error
Gets an agent through a trufflehog full-history scan that keeps timing out: bound the history and stream results. Use when agent-driven history scans never finish. Not for auth errors.
TL;DR
Full history is unbounded work. Bound it with commit ranges, stream findings as they come instead of buffering, and let the agent resume from the last completed commit.
Error
agent failed to finish the full-history scan: trufflehog timed out with errorSteps
- Split history into commit ranges the agent processes sequentially. Expected: each range fits the budget.
- Stream JSON findings per commit instead of collecting everything in memory. Expected: constant memory use.
- Record the last completed commit as a resume cursor. Expected: timeouts resume, not restart.
- Skip or sample binary-heavy ranges that slow detectors disproportionately. Expected: the long tail shrinks.
- Reassemble the streamed findings into the final report. Expected: complete history covered.
When to use
- Agent trufflehog scans timing out on long histories.
- Building resumable scan agents.
When not to use
- Authentication failures.
- The scan errors on a specific commit (investigate it).
Tool compatibility
- Trufflehog git scans; JSON streaming; resume cursors.
Variant phrasings
trufflehog full history timeout
Range and resume.
agent scan of git history never finishes
Same bounding.
Why it happens
History length times detector cost exceeds any single run budget; without cursors, each timeout restarts from zero.
Edge cases
- Rewritten history invalidates cursors; detect and restart cleanly.
- Shallow or partial clones change what history exists; document the clone flags.
- Findings order is not stable across runs; dedup by finding id.
Provenance
Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_M4UDsY1XHUXdPBLpnbTVZA