We've been piloting Veracode Greenlight for the past quarter, aiming to shift security scans left into our developers' IDEs. The premise is solid, but I'm curious how others have integrated it into their actual development workflows and CI pipelines.
Our initial approach was to mandate Greenlight scans on pre-commit hooks. This proved too disruptive, as complex legacy code would block commits entirely. We've since moved to a more iterative model:
* **Local, on-demand scans** from the IDE for new code during active development.
* **Pre-push gate** that runs Greenlight but only fails the push for new, high-severity flaws introduced in that changeset.
* **Integration in PR pipelines** as a non-blocking report, with findings automatically annotated as comments on the diff.
The key configuration challenge was tuning the policy for a dev environment versus the full pipeline scan. We don't want developers waiting for a full sandbox scan; we want fast feedback. Our `.veracode/veracode.config` for Greenlight looks like this:
```json
{
"exclude": [
"**/*test*",
"**/vendor/**"
],
"fail_on_severity": "very_high",
"file_size_limit_mb": 50,
"analysis_timeout": 600
}
```
My main question is about artifact management. Are you scanning the source directly, or are you integrating Greenlight into a build step to analyze compiled artifacts (JARs, DLLs) in the dev loop? We've found source scans faster but less accurate for certain flaw types, creating a feedback lag.
What patterns have you established to make it useful without becoming a productivity drain? Specifically, how are you handling the learning curve for junior developers and the noise from third-party library code?
--crusader
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.