Spotbugs VS semgrep

SpotBugs is an open source static anlysis tool. "SpotBugs uses static analysis to inspect Java bytecode for occurrences of bug patterns." This means that SpotBugs runs against the compiled source source code, rather than raw Java files. Because it analyses bytecode, it can catch some types of bugs that source code analysis would not catch.

SpotBugs is a great tool for static code analysis. Recently I got two similar warnings in one of the codebases I work on and I had to fix it.

SpotBugs is pretty good.

PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)

While at it you could also point them to static code analyzers such as error_prone, spotbugs and pmd (use all 3 at once - they complement each other in detecting different issues).

First, it's better to use SpotBugs 4.4.1 and above, that includes a fix to make SARIF report compatible with Github code scanning API requirements.

RUN wget https://github.com/spotbugs/spotbugs/releases/download/4.4.1/spotbugs-4.4.1.tgz

2. Semgrep

Also, we can use a tool like Semgrep to audit the use of the middleware through all routes using a custom rule, to show a simple example we can use a rule like the below (Note this is just example which covers one way of defining routes in Express, for production the rule needs to be extended to include all other ways of defining routes).

Semgrep OSS Owner/Maintainer: Semgrep Age: First release on GitHub on February 6th, 2020 License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1

Semgrep - https://semgrep.dev

For the SAST stage, I used SonarQube tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform developed by SonarSource for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs and code smells on more than 30 programming languages. I preferred SonarQube instead of other SAST tools because it has a detailed documentation and plugins about integration with Jenkins and SonarQube works with Java projects pretty well. Of course you can similar multi-language-supported tools such as Semgrep or language-specific tools such as Bandit.

> Not sure I understand your point.

The problem is using Treesitter (for syntax highlighting and "semantic movements") and an LSP at the same time. So if your language has a LSP, using Treesitter additionally is redundant at best and introduces inconcistency at worst.

I'm not talking about using Treesitter as the parser for the LSP.

> Most popular languages have language-specific tools

I'd say even less popular langauges like Coq^H^H^HRocq, Lean 4, Koka, Idris, Unison, ... have their "own" tools, I do not know of a language that uses a Treesitter parser in its LSP, but I do know about tools like https://semgrep.dev/ (written in OCaml) and Github's code search which use Treesitter.

Well, when I seach for "semgrep", I get a very nice corporate landing page with a "Book Demo" button. Which is a level of hassle that just isn't worth it for smaller teams, because "Book Demo" usually means "We're going to try to do a dance to see how much money we can extract from you." Which smaller teams may only want to do for a handful of key tools.

(4 years ago, I was more willing to put up with enterprise licensing. But in the last two years, I've seen way too many enterprise vendors try to squeeze every penny they can get from existing clients. An enterprise sales process now often means "Expect 30% annual price hikes once you're in too deep to back out.")

There's also an open source "semgrep" project here: https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep. But this seems to be basically a vulernability scanner, going by the README.

Whereas AST-grep seems to focus heavily on things like:

1. One-off searching: "Search my tree for this pattern."

2. Refactoring: "Replace this pattern with this other pattern."

AST-grep also includes a vulnerability scanning mode like semgrep.

It's possible that semgrep also has nice support for (1) and (2), but it isn't clearly visible on their corporate landing page or the first open source README I found.

7. Semgrep