Use policies in the SDLC

You can apply policies across all stages of the SDLC, from the developer’s local development environment, in the IDE or CLI, through to Git-based workflows and CI/CD, and into production.

These multiple security and compliance controls ensure issues are flagged as early as possible in the development process when it is least costly and time-consuming to fix them.

In addition, the .snyk file is a policy file that Snyk uses to define certain analysis behaviors and to specify patches for the CLI and CI/CD plugins. See The .snyk file for details

Assign policies to Projects or Organizations

For both security policies and license policies, you can apply a policy to Project attributes and to an Organization. This enables you to assign policies to Projects and to Organizations. For details, see Assign policies to Projects and Assign a policy to an Organization.

Example: assign a license policy to Projects

Scenario: The legal team in your company requires strict license compliance controls for business-critical front-end applications but is less concerned about internal development Projects.

To meet this requirement, first add the Critical, Production, and Frontend attributes to the Snyk Projects you want this policy to apply to:

Add relevant attributes to a Project from the Issues tab

Next, create a new license policy and apply the policy to those attributes:

Apply license policy to selected attributes

In the policy itself, a high severity can be applied to any copyleft license identified in Projects, such as the GPL-3.0 and AGPL-3.0 licenses. When you create license policies, Snyk recommends that you describe why Snyk will fail the test. Thus, for example, if a build fails due to the GPL license, developers can see the explanation, and they will know what action to take. See Create a license policy and rules for details.

This policy is now assigned to all Projects with the selected attributes applied and takes effect the next time Snyk scans those Projects.

See License policies for more details.

Example: assign a security policy to Projects

Using a process similar to the one in the previous example, you can define a security policy to automatically ignore all Medium severity vulnerabilities in the FrontEnd environment without a known exploit:

Snyk security policy - specify vulnerabilities to ignore

This policy is now assigned to all Projects with the selected attributes applied and takes effect the next time Snyk scans those Projects.

See Security policies for more details.

Apply policies in GitHub repos

For GitHub Projects monitored by Snyk, any new pull request from a contributing developer can be checked against policies assigned to that Project. This ensures that policy-breaking code cannot be committed to the repository.

See PR Checks for details of Snyk’s PR Checks feature.

An example follows of a PR check on a JavaScript package license.

This example shows a pull request to add the fullpage.js package to a JavaScript application. Although this change passes the security policy check, because the latest version of the package has no known vulnerability, it fails the license policy check because the GPLv3 license is included in violation of the license policy of the company.

PR Check fails on license compliance

Apply policies in CI/CD

Assigned policies take effect in CI/CD, ensuring builds comply with security and compliance boundaries.