Skip to main content

Run scans using GitHub Action and Drone Plugin steps

GitHub Actions is a GitHub feature that enables you to automate various event-driven activities, such as security scanning, in GitHub. This topic describes how to run GitHub Action scans and ingest the results into your Harness pipelines.

Important notes​

  • GitHub Action security scans are useful primarily for integrated CI/STO pipelines, which require both CI and STO licenses. For more information, go to Migrate from GitHub Actions to Harness CI.

  • You can run scans using GitHub Action steps and Plugin steps.

  • The type of step to use depends on your build infrastructure. For Harness Cloud infrastructures, use Action steps. For Kubernetes infrastructures, you can use Action or Plugin steps.

  • GitHub and Harness use slightly different terminologies for similar concepts:

    • GitHub workflow = Harness pipeline
    • GitHub job = Harness Stage
    • GitHub step = Harness step

  • Harness recommends that you output your scan results to a data file in SARIF format. You can then use a Custom Ingestion step to ingest the results into your pipeline.

    For a description of the end-to-end workflow, go to Ingest SARIF scan results.

  • As described below, you need to translate settings from the GitHub Action YAML to the Harness pipeline YAML. It is good practice to configure these settings in the YAML editor.

  1. Open the CI or STO pipeline where you want to run the action, then go to the Build or Security Tests stage where you want to run the action.

  2. Click Add Step and then add a GitHub Action plugin step.

  3. Use Settings to specify the Github Action you want to use and to pass variables and attributes required by the Action.

    For information about the settings to set, go to the external scanner documentation.

    For a complete description of how to set up a GitHub Action Plugin step, go to Use the GitHub Action plugin step.

KeyDescriptionValue formatValue example
usesSpecify the Action's repo, along with a branch or tag.[repo]@[tag]ajinabraham/njsscan-action@master
withProvide a map of key-value pairs representing settings required by the action itself. At a minimum, make sure you configure the action to publish results in SARIF format. key: value args: . --sarif --output result.sarif || true
envSpecify a map of environment variables to pass to the Action. For example, you might need to pass an access token to scan a private repository.key: valueGITHUB_TOKEN: <+secrets.getValue("github_pat")>
  1. Add a Custom Ingest step and set it up to ingest the data file.

Example setup​

This example uses the njsscan action to scan a container. As noted in the Github Code Scanning SARIF upload snippet, you can configure the args value to output the scan results to a SARIF file:

name: njsscan
on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]
jobs:
  njsscan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: njsscan code scanning
    steps:
    - name: Checkout the code
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: nodejsscan scan
      id: njsscan
      uses: ajinabraham/njsscan-action@master
      # ARGUMENTS THAT SPECIFY THE SARIF OUTPUT FILE
      with:
        args: '. --sarif --output results.sarif || true'
    - name: Upload njsscan report
      uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v2
      with:
        sarif_file: results.sarif

Given this, you would set up the Action step in your Harness pipeline like this. You can then set up a CustomIngest step to ingest the trivy-results.sarif file that gets generated.

- step:
    type: Action
    name: njsscan
    identifier: njsscan
    spec:
      uses: ajinabraham/njsscan-action@master
      # ARGUMENTS THAT SPECIFY THE SARIF OUTPUT FILE
      with:
        args: . --sarif --output result.sarif || true
YAML pipeline example
pipeline:
  projectIdentifier: myProject
  orgIdentifier: myOrg
  tags: {}
  identifier: nodejs-repo-scane
  name: NodeJS repo scan
  properties:
    ci:
      codebase:
        connectorRef: MY_REPO_CONNECTOR
        repoName: https://github.com/OWASP/NodeGoat
        build: <+input>
  stages:
    - stage:
        name: njsscan
        identifier: njsscan
        type: CI
        spec:
          cloneCodebase: true
          execution:
            steps:
              - step:
                  type: Action
                  name: njsscan
                  identifier: njsscan
                  spec:
                    uses: ajinabraham/njsscan-action@master
                    with:
                      args: . --sarif --output result.sarif || true
              - step:
                  type: CustomIngest
                  name: CustomIngest_1
                  identifier: CustomIngest_1
                  spec:
                    mode: ingestion
                    config: default
                    target:
                      name: nodegoat
                      type: repository
                      variant: develop
                    advanced:
                      log:
                        level: info
                    ingestion:
                      file: /harness/result.sarif
          platform:
            os: Linux
            arch: Amd64
          runtime:
            type: Cloud
            spec: {}
          sharedPaths:
            - /shared/customer_artifacts/