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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:

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