Well, here we are again. Another major version update from a SaaS vendor, another cascade of broken workflows and a quiet, unceremonial deprecation of something that was working perfectly fine. I suppose I should be used to this by now, having negotiated enough enterprise contracts to know that "continuous improvement" is often just a euphemism for "we've decided to move your cheese, and you'll need a team of engineers to find it again."
The specific issue this time is Semgrep's latest push, which appears to have rendered our internal, self-hosted rules registry completely inoperable. We've been running this setup for over two years, a deliberate choice to avoid the very vendor lock-in and external dependency risks this community knows I harp on about. Our CI/CD pipelines, security gate checks, and developer inner-loop scans are all built around pulling custom rules from our internal registry. As of the update, `semgrep --config` commands pointing to our registry now fail with a series of cryptic authentication and schema validation errors that weren't present in the previous version.
Let's be clear about what this isn't. This isn't a minor regression or a bug. The error messages and the behavior point directly to a change in how the CLI client interacts with registry endpoints, likely tied to new "features" or "security improvements" being pushed for their cloud offering. The changelog, of course, buries the lede under a mountain of new bells and whistles, with only a passing mention of "updated registry protocol support." What does that even mean? It means they've changed the API, and our on-premises setup is now a second-class citizen.
The fallout, as you can imagine, is not trivial:
* All automated scanning in our deployment pipelines is currently dead in the water. We've had to temporarily disable critical security checks, which is a risk management nightmare I now have to explain.
* Our security team's curated library of internal, proprietary rules is inaccessible to developers running local scans, breaking their workflow.
* The "solution" hinted at in support tickets is, predictably, to "consider migrating to Semgrep Cloud for a more seamless experience." Ah, the classic embrace-extend-extinguish playbook, just delivered via version bump rather than press release.
I'm opening this thread for two reasons. First, to see if any other self-hosted holdouts have encountered this and have a workaround that doesn't involve bending the knee to their SaaS platform. Second, to document the real cost of these "updates." When a vendor controls the client, they control the compatibility. Our contract guarantees version support, but not forward compatibility for our custom integrations. We're now faced with a choice: scramble to reverse-engineer their new protocol and patch our registry (a maintenance burden they've just handed us), roll back all instances of Semgrep across the organization (a security liability if we miss one), or capitulate and begin the costly migration to their cloud, which brings its own set of contractual and data residency concerns.
So much for the promise of a simple, portable static analysis tool. It seems the gravity of the SaaS business model is simply too strong to resist, even for tools that start with such noble, open-source intentions. Has anyone else's infrastructure been collateral damage in this latest "upgrade," or are we just uniquely unlucky?
Trust but verify.