Application deployment options

DAST requires a deployed application to be available to scan.

Depending on the complexity of the target application, there are a few options as to how to deploy and configure the DAST template. A set of example applications have been provided with their configurations in the DAST demonstrations project.

Review apps

Review apps are the most involved method of deploying your DAST target application. To assist in the process, GitLab created a review app deployment using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This example can be found in the Review apps - GKE project, plus detailed instructions to configure review apps for DAST in the README.

Docker Services

If your application uses Docker containers you have another option for deploying and scanning with DAST. After your Docker build job completes and your image is added to your container registry, you can use the image as a service.

By using service definitions in your .gitlab-ci.yml, you can scan services with the DAST analyzer.

When adding a services section to the job, the alias is used to define the hostname that can be used to access the service. In the following example, the alias: yourapp portion of the dast job definition means that the URL to the deployed application uses yourapp as the hostname (https://yourapp/).

stages:
  - build
  - dast

include:
  - template: DAST.gitlab-ci.yml

# Deploys the container to the GitLab container registry
deploy:
  services:
  - name: docker:dind
    alias: dind
  image: docker:20.10.16
  stage: build
  script:
    - docker login -u gitlab-ci-token -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - docker pull $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest || true
    - docker build --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest .
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest

dast:
  services: # use services to link your app container to the dast job
    - name: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
      alias: yourapp

variables:
  DAST_TARGET_URL: https://yourapp
  DAST_FULL_SCAN: "true" # do a full scan
  DAST_BROWSER_SCAN: "true" # use the browser-based GitLab DAST crawler

Most applications depend on multiple services such as databases or caching services. By default, services defined in the services fields cannot communicate with each another. To allow communication between services, enable the FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD feature flag.

variables:
  FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD: "true" # enable network per build so all services can communicate on the same network

services: # use services to link the container to the dast job
  - name: mongo:latest
    alias: mongo
  - name: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
    alias: yourapp