Skip to main content

Azure Pipelines - Generate your software bill of materials (SBOM)

If you have never heard about the software bill of materials(SBOM), have a look at my previous post here. In short, an SBOM lists all the components that make up your software , or were used to build it.

Last month Microsoft open sourced their own software bill of materials generation tool. You can find the source code and corresponding releases in Github: https://github.com/microsoft/sbom-tool.

Integrate the SBOM tool in Azure Pipelines

As generating an SBOM is typically not something that you do manually, here is how I integrated this in my Azure Pipelines.

Remark: I’ll first show you how to do this on Windows as my current build server is still Windows based. If you want to know how to do this on Linux, scroll further down to the end of this post.

  • Go to Azure Pipelines and open the pipeline that you want to edit.
  • Add a new Powershell Task after the build activity and change the Type to Inline.

  • Paste the following script:
    • This will download the the sbom tool and executes it. The resulting sbom files will be written to the Artifact Staging directory.

# Write your PowerShell commands here.
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/microsoft/sbom-tool/releases/latest/download/sbom-tool-win-x64.exe" -OutFile "$(Agent.TempDirectory)/sbom-tool.exe"
$(Agent.TempDirectory)/sbom-tool generate -b $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory) -bc $(Build.SourcesDirectory) -pn Example -pv 1.0.0 -nsb https://sbom.mycompany.com -V Verbose

  • The sbom-tool uses the following signature:
generate -b <drop path> -bc <build components path> -pn <package name> -pv <package version> -nsb <namespace uri base>
  • Update the package name and package version. Also set the namespace to something unique for your company.(The tool will add a unique identifier for you) .
    • E.g. https://companyName.com/teamName/<packageName>/<packageVersion>/<new-guid>
  • If you know execute the pipeline, the output should look like this:

  • In your pipeline artifacts you should find a generated SBOM file and hash:

Here is the yaml variant:

And if you are using a Linux based build agent:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more