rules_oss_audit

Overview

With hundreds of thousands of open-source software (OSS) projects to choose from, OSS is a vital component of almost any codebase. However, with over 80 unique licenses to comply with, each requiring unique care, complexity of managing OSS usage cannot be overlooked. At VMware, like many other organizations, product releases must comply with legal and license requirements of the open source software being used. This process adds friction to the development cycle and can result in product-release delays.

To address pain points in our workflow at VMware, we've created a new OSS compliance workflow rooted in a Bazel rule, oss_audit. With oss_audit, we accomplish 3 things:

1. Developers get a deterministic Bill of Materials with every build. There is no need for a separate OSS scanning step in the post-build stage, removing toil and room for error.

2. OSS validation happens at build time, so developers are quickly informed about any problems with OSS they have introduced or the existence of any denied open-source packages in the code base.

3. Bazel's multi-language support allows us to have one tool that works cross-platform.

About the oss_audit workflow

The oss_audit rules uses a Bazel aspect that analyzes the dependency graph of a build and collects license information about each package it finds. Additionally, it consumes a list of approved and denied OSS packages (usually from legal and security teams) to alert developers when denied packages are being used. At VMware, the approved_list.yaml and denied_list.yaml files are automatically generated by querying our OSS review tool and then checked into source control for use by the next build.

Then, oss_audit outputs two files. First, it outputs a "BOM" yaml file, which includes information on each OSS dependency. Second, it outputs a "BOM-issues" file, containing a subset of OSS dependencies that have been denied for use or that are still waiting for approval. At VMware, a Jenkins job consumes the "BOM" to file any new OSS packages with our OSS review tool. Then, people from the legal and security teams review the packages asynchronously.

oss_audit can audit any build target (such as a java_binary, pkg_tar, etc.), but is currently only aware of Java dependencies via metadata provided by rules_jvm_external. However, it can be extended to support other target types as well. We are currently developing a prototype that supports C++ and have plans to add support for other languages soon.

We hope our work inform the design of general-purpose licensing infrastructure for the Bazel community.

Note: this solution doesn't currently support Windows.

Getting started

To use oss_audit in your project, first add it to your WORKSPACE file:

load("@bazel_tools//tools/build_defs/repo:http.bzl", "http_archive")

RULE_OSS_AUDIT_COMMIT = "5ae338712005a616c11d69a669d669e3742c1c83"

http_archive(
    name = "rules_oss_audit",
    sha256 = "cabb4d985eb9efe40326436e683a90e74603dd282ae2a0af2a21bf078f07cf1b",
    strip_prefix = "rules_oss_audit-%s" % RULE_OSS_AUDIT_COMMIT,
    url = "https://github.com/vmware/rules_oss_audit/archive/%s.zip" % RULE_OSS_AUDIT_COMMIT,
)

load("@rules_oss_audit//oss_audit:repositories.bzl", "rules_oss_audit_dependencies")
rules_oss_audit_dependencies()

load("@rules_oss_audit//oss_audit:setup.bzl", "rules_oss_audit_setup")
rules_oss_audit_setup()

For basic usage, add the following code in your BUILD file:

load("@oss_audit:java/oss_audit.bzl", "oss_audit")

oss_audit(
    name = "your-project-audit",
    src = ":your-target-to-audit-here",
    approved_list = "//your-project:approved_list.yaml",
    denied_list = "//your-project:denied_list.yaml",
)

Try it out

Overview

The Java project in this example is a project from the bazelbuild/examples repository. It is an application that compares two numbers, using the Ints.compare method from Guava. We've extended the project to create an .rpm package and a .tar file, which we audit with oss_audit.

Prerequisites

• To run the example, install Bazel
• To build the example RPM on macOS, install rpmbuild with brew install rpm

Build & Run

Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:vmware/rules_oss_audit.git
cd rules_oss_audit

Audit the example .rpm:

$ bazel build //examples:rpm-oss-audit

The following files will be generated

• bazel-bin/examples/oss-audit-example-rpm.bom.yaml
• bazel-bin/examples/oss-audit-example-rpm.bom-issues.yaml

Audit the example .tar:

$ bazel build //examples:tar-oss-audit

The following files will be generated

• bazel-bin/examples/oss-audit-example-tar.bom.yaml
• bazel-bin/examples/oss-audit-example-tar.bom-issues.yaml

Suppressing OSS Validation

By default, the build will fail if any denied OSS packages are found in the code. Because of this, it may be convenient to temporarily suppress validation.

To suppress build failures due to a list of specific denied package, use the suppress attribute of oss_audit. See examples/BUILD.bazel for an example.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license

Get in touch

For questions, ideas, or just reaching out to the team, feel free to open a discussion in our GitHub Discussion section.

Contributing

The rules_oss_audit project team welcomes contributions from the community. If you wish to contribute code and you have not signed our contributor license agreement (CLA), our bot will update the issue when you open a Pull Request. For any questions about the CLA process, please refer to our FAQ. For more detailed information, refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.