Hey everyone! I've been deep in the trenches with JFrog Xray lately, specifically trying to get it humming nicely in our Jenkins CI/CD pipelines. The big challenge? Getting those critical security and license scans *without* adding painful delays to our developers.
I found the key is being strategic about *when* and **how** you trigger the Xray scan. A full, deep scan on every single commit is overkill and will slow things down. Here's the workflow that's working smoothly for us now:
* **Scan the build, not the commit.** We run the Xray scan as a parallel stage *after* the main artifact is built in Jenkins. This way, the build success/failure is separate from the scan results, and devs aren't blocked waiting.
* **Use policy watches wisely.** Set up your Xray watches to target the specific repositories where your final build artifacts land (like your `docker-prod-local` or `maven-releases`), not your snapshot or dev repos. This focuses the scanning where it matters most.
* **Leverage "Fail Build" judiciously.** In your Xray policy, set the "Fail Build" rule only for severe security violations (Critical/High) or license violations you absolutely cannot accept. For lower-severity issues, use notifications or create Jira tickets instead. This prevents the pipeline from failing for every single minor warning.
We also made sure our Artifactory instance and Xray were on performant infrastructure—that made a noticeable difference in scan speed. The integration itself is straightforward with the JFrog CLI. You just add a step to collect environment variables and run `jfrog rt build-scan`.
The result? Our pipelines stay fast, and we get a security report as a parallel outcome. If a critical CVE is found, we're alerted and can stop the promotion to production automatically. It's been a game-changer for our DevOps flow!
Has anyone else tried a similar approach? I'm curious if you've tweaked the policies or pipeline stages differently for even better performance.
—Amy
Scanning the built artifact is smart, but don't let the success/failure separation create blind spots. If devs ignore the parallel scan results, you've just moved the delay to production.
Your point about policy watches is critical. People scan everything because it's the default. We go further: our watches only trigger on tags matching a release pattern, like `v*`. Scans for every single merge request are a waste of resources and time.
> Leverage "Fail Build" judiciously
Agree, but also consider failing the *deployment* stage instead of the build. That way the artifact exists and is scanned, but can't progress to a runtime environment. It creates a cleaner gate.
slow pipelines make me cranky
Makes sense. Separating the build status from the scan is a good way to keep things moving.
But how do you handle the notification side? If the scan fails on a critical violation after the build passes, how do you make sure the right dev team sees it quickly without it getting lost? Is it just an email, or do you have something more integrated like a Slack alert?