DependencyCheck VS starter-workflows

Use Security Tools: To identify known vulnerabilities in your project's dependencies, you can utilize commands like npm audit or employ third-party security scanners such as DependencyCheck or Dependabot. These tools thoroughly analyze the dependency tree and offer actionable insights to assist you in resolving any identified vulnerabilities.

OWASP DependencyCheck - a really decent tool for scanning your project for vulnerable dependencies. It is actively developed and updated and up to date with the most latest vulnerabilities. Sometimes it can be a pain in the ass, though. Some security researchers and such find a vulnerability, publish it and the next day our CI/CD pipelines fail (the dependency check build step prevents the code from going to production). And not always there is a fix available. So, some vulnerabilities have to be ignored, temporarily. Also, to be able to ignore a vulnerability one has to do a fast risk assessment. And that will require from him to read about the vulnerability and decide if it is safe to be ignored or some different workaround must be found.

The ultimate guide somehow fails to mention the best CVE checker: https://github.com/jeremylong/DependencyCheck

We run https://github.com/jeremylong/DependencyCheck over our dependency tree regularly, via this Clojure wrapper: https://github.com/clj-holmes/clj-watson which tells us the dependency tree path to each item that has a CVE and also the version in which the CVE is addressed, if known.

From OWASP for those class of tools you could look into DependencyCheck and DependencyTrack

DependencyCheck is an open source tool that checks for vulnerabilities in dependencies used within a project. While it is a reactive tool, it's an important one since the code a developer writes is not the only code an application uses.

One more aspect to consider, although I know it is not the primary ask of the post, is to be sure and run something like dependency check on your repository. There are quite a few vulnerabilities being injected through the packaging process these days.

jeremylong/DependencyCheck (Java): OWASP dependency-check is a software composition analysis utility that detects publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in application dependencies.

GitHub Actions is a feature-rich CI/CD platform embedded within GitHub, enabling developers to automate, customize, and execute software development workflows directly in their repositories. An Action inside GitHub Actions is a discrete unit of automation that performs a specific task within a workflow. All the Actions are reusable, and there are many to choose from. You can even create your own reusable ones.

actions/starter-workflows

The real power of using PHP code-quality tools is when it’s added to your continuous integration process, which means it automatically checks the code every time someone makes a push or pull request to your project repo. In this section, we'll be looking at how to do just that. GitHub actions is available for free so we'll use it for demo purposes. Note that there are some limits to private repos, so set your test repo to public if you can.

You can even automate the running of this script — hence the directory name automation — to happen every time the data changes, using GitHub Actions.

You might remember that I’ve been taking an interest in GitHub Actions for the last year or so (I even wrote a book on the subject). And at the Perl Conference in Toronto last summer I gave a talk called “GitHub Actions for Perl Development” (here are the slides and the video).

Preevy is designed to be easily run in CI/CD workflows, such as GH Actions, Circle CI and others.

I set out to add further development and contribution tools to my ez-txt2html converter. Specifically, I wanted to introduce an initial Continuous Integration workflow. For this, I used the “Python Application” workflow template in Github Actions to create a CI testing workflow that builds a Py v3.12 environments, builds the project dependencies, runs Flake8 linting and Black formatting and then subsequently runs PyTest using the test suites I’ve written previously.

GitHub Actions

To start, I turned to the starter-workflows repository, a valuable resource housing diverse YAML files for various project types. My project being in .NET, I checked out the dotnet.yml file to get insights into the setup process. Understanding the YAML syntax and keywords like on, push, jobs, and steps is crucial for crafting an effective workflow. In my case, I wanted to the workflow to trigger "on" any "pushes" on the main branch. The job describes the specific task which can be given a name, and steps outline the necessary steps to run the job.

CI requires dedicated machines to checkout our code, built it and run tests. We can either setup our own machines, or we can provision a CI cloud provider to do this for us. GitHub actually provides its own CI service, GitHub Actions, that lets you automate workflows to GitHub repo events, like making a pull request or merging to a main branch.