Sonatype Nexus IQ Plugin for VS Code

Sonatype's VSCode extension allows you to surface and remediate issues in your project's dependencies without ever leaving your development environment.
Any developer can use the extension for free against our publicly available OSS Index vulnerability database while our commercial users can connect to Sonatype's Nexus IQ Server to evaluate against organizational policy. Drill down into all of your dependencies to examine each package version for violations to determine whether you should upgrade or move to a different version at a glance.
Good news for polyglots -- the extension allows you to view violations across multiple ecosystems at once across the following formats:
- npm/yarn (
npm install
or yarn install
required)
- maven (
pom.xml
)
- python (
requirements.txt
or poetry.lock
)
- RubyGems (
Gemfile.lock
)
- Golang (
dep
or go mod
)
- PHP (
composer.lock
)
- Rust/Cargo (
Cargo.lock
)
- R/CRAN (see known quirks)
- Conan (any conan formatted
*.lock
files)
Sonatype Nexus IQ Scan

OSS Index Scan

Installation
- Install from the marketplace link
- Install directly from the VSCode extension interface:

Configuration
Configuration is done in VSCode's extension settings: Preferences > Settings > Sonatype Explorer

If you are a commercial Sonatype IQ user, switch the data source to iqServer
and enter your IQ endpoint and credentials. You can enter your password which will be stored in cleartext, or you can leave this blank and be prompted for a password on start-up:

Additonally, you can create a user token and save this in the password field instead so you are not storing credentials in plain text.
Themes
The extension supports color theme changes dynamically.

Known Quirks
We try to use other tooling whenever possible, to avoid reinventing the wheel (that's what Open Source is about anyways, right!). However, due to using this tooling, we are at the mercy of it, sometimes, so here's a list of quirks we've ran into while developing/using this extension ourself.
npm/yarn
- We read the actual dependencies you have installed, which means we parse your node_modules folder. If this folder doesn't exist, we won't find any dependencies! Make sure to run
npm i
or yarn
on your project if you haven't done so already.
RubyGems
- We parse the
Gemfile.lock
file, so if you don't have one, you won't see any dependencies!
- If your
Gemfile.lock
has no specs in it, we will not show any dependencies.
Golang
go mod
- Golang support depends on an installation of Golang
- We run
go list -m all
to get your dependency list
- This includes test dependencies, so it might be noisy
- It would seem due to this running in VS Code, it runs in a slightly different shell/user, and thus it downloads your dependencies. We set this to
/tmp/gocache
in code, which may not work on Windows (PRs welcome!), so it might be slowish on its first run
dep
- We parse the
Gopkg.lock
toml file provided by dep
- Some
dep
versions do not use semver
, so unless you are using a version that looks like 1.0.0
etc... you won't get results from OSS Index or IQ Server
dep
support works on Windows/OS X/Linux, as we are not running any OS specific commands
R (Cran)
- R support depends on R being available, and your project needs a
.Rbuildignore
file otherwise we cannot determine it's an R project
- This extension also runs an R script to get your installed packages (currently the best way we know of to do this), the way we get these can be seen at
scripts/installed.r
in our GitHub repo
- The way the R script runs, it finds all of the packages you've installed in the R environment, so not just for your project. This is because there is really no way to query for project specific packages, and appears to be a limitation of R.
Various and Sundry
- "My project has 3,000 dependencies, why is this so slow?!?". We chunk up requests to OSS Index (free solution) in sections of 128 dependencies, so for 3,000 dependencies, you are making 24 https POST requests for information, and then it's merging those results, etc... We'd love to know your feedback on the tool, so if you do run into this, open up an issue and let us know! Same goes for IQ Server, there could be quite a bit to process.
Development
Development requires running this project in Visual Studio Code, for ease of testing etc...
You'll need a working version of nodejs (we have been using 12.x and higher), and then:
npm install && npm run build
Then:
Debug > Launch Extension
If you are working on functionality that requires IQ Server, you'll need an instance running, and configured in the settings for the project. OSS Index will work out of the box.
All of the React specific code can be found in src
. The rest of the code is contained within ext-src
and this is what communicates with either OSS Index or IQ Server.
We highly suggest installing "Webview Developer Tools" for this project, as the front end is written in React, and it's nice to have that to see what's going on.
Contributing to Nexus IQ Plugin for VS Code
- Run
FORMAT=Maven npm run generate-format
, substituting the value for FORMAT for the name of the Format you are working on, example: Maven
in this case
- Implement the methods you need to in these newly generated classes, and then in
ext-src/packages/ComponentContainer.ts
, add your Implementation!
Contributing
We care a lot about making the world a safer place, and that's why we created this extension. If you as well want to speed up the pace of software development by working on this project, jump on in! Before you start work, create a new issue, or comment on an existing issue, to let others know you are!
Releasing
We use semantic-release to generate releases. For example,
to perform a "patch" release, add a commit to master with a comment like:
fix: `policyViolations of undefined` when loading a python project with requirements.txt (see Issue [#127](https://github.com/sonatype-nexus-community/vscode-iq-plugin/issues/127))
Without such a commit comment, commits to the master
branch will cause a build failure during the release
process due to an attempt to reuse an existing version number.
To avoid such build failures without performing a release, be sure your commit message includes [skip ci]
.
The Fine Print
It is worth noting that this is NOT SUPPORTED by Sonatype, and is a contribution of ours
to the open source community (read: you!)
Remember:
- Use this contribution at the risk tolerance that you have
- Do NOT file Sonatype support tickets related to this Visual Studio Code extension in regard to this project
- DO file issues here on GitHub, so that the community can pitch in
Phew, that was easier than I thought. Last but not least of all:
Have fun creating and using this extension and the Sonatype OSS Index, we are glad to have you here!
Getting help
Looking to contribute to our code but need some help? There's a few ways to get information: