Hey everyone! I've been lurking for a bit, soaking up all the knowledge here. I've done my fair share of database migrations (seriously, from MySQL to Postgres to Mongo and back again 😅), but I'm completely new to the SAST world. My small team (we're talking 5 devs) is building a couple of Python Flask APIs and some data pipeline scripts. We've been lucky so far, but I know we're flying blind on security. The boss just asked me to "look into some scanning tools," and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.
I've been poking around and the landscape is huge—commercial tools, open-source projects, features that bleed into DAST and SCA. For a small Python shop like ours, where should we even begin? I'm looking for something that:
- Integrates relatively easily into our existing GitHub Actions workflows.
- Has a manageable learning curve and a decent false-positive rate (I've heard horror stories).
- Is cost-effective. We're not a giant corp, so a free tier or reasonable pricing for small teams is a huge plus.
- Focuses on Python, obviously, but understanding dependencies (we use a mix of pip and Poetry) would be a big bonus.
I tried running Bandit on a small test project, and while it was straightforward to set up, I got a flood of findings. I spent hours sorting through things like "hardcoded passwords" that were just debug strings. Here's a tiny snippet of what I saw:
```python
# This got flagged by Bandit as B105 (hardcoded_password_string)
debug_header = "Authorization: Bearer test123_for_debug_only"
```
I know I can suppress things with `# nosec`, but I'd love a tool that's a bit more context-aware out of the box, or at least has good guidance on tuning.
So, my main questions are:
1. **First Steps:** Is starting with an open-source tool like Bandit or Semgrep the right move for a team of our size? Or should we consider a managed platform from day one?
2. **Tuning & Noise:** How do you all handle initial configuration and reducing noise? Is it just expected that you'll spend the first week fine-tuning rules?
3. **Integration:** For those in small teams, do you run scans locally in pre-commit hooks, in CI, or both?
4. **Monorepo Considerations:** Our projects are in a single monorepo. Do any tools handle this particularly well or poorly?
I'm eager to learn from your experiences—what pitfalls you hit, what you wish you'd known starting out. Any war stories or "if I could go back in time" advice would be incredibly appreciated!
—B
Backup first.