Blackduck Synopsys Yarn Detector cannot find project version name - gitlab-ci

Question

I'm using Blackduck version 5.6.2 on a Create-React-App application with dependencies installed using yarn v1.22.11.
Blackduck executes as a job in a GitLab CI pipeline. Previously, I used npm to install the packages in the blackduck step before running the scan. Blackduck scanner was able to pick up the project name and version number without any explicit configuration.
I've recently changed from NPM to yarn to take advantage of selective dependency resolution feature in attempts to overcome nested dependencies reported by Blackduck scanner. Once I converted the Blackduck step to use yarn, Blackduck picked up on yarn.lock and package.json files in my repository to use Yarn detector this was seen from the outputs (and the expected behaviour according to
Synopsys' documentation). However, it is no longer able to pick up the project version name correctly.
Here are the messages that indicate this:
2021-09-27 19:13:47 INFO [main] --- Determining project info.
2021-09-27 19:13:47 INFO [main] --- A project name could not be decided. Using the name of the source path.
2021-09-27 19:13:47 INFO [main] --- A project version name could not be decided. Using the default version text.
Once the test completes and I visit the blackduck web console for test results, I now see "Default Detect Version" as the version name instead of the version number that I had before.
I've tried passing -detect.project.version.notes=./package.json argument into the step that starts the blackduck scanner shell script, but it's still falling back onto "Default Detect Version" as the version name.
The docs for yarn detector stops after specifying arguments to include and exclude workspaces, the path to yarn binary, and if production dependencies should be included.
Does anyone have any idea why the Yarn detector is unable to pick up the version number from package.json and how I can address this issue without passing a hardcoded value as the argument to the scanner shell script?

Answer 1

I was able to solve both the project name and version issue as well as blackduck scanner reporting vulnerabilities within nested dependency by performing the following
Switch from using yarn to npm for package installation.
This allowed the NPM detector to utilize package.json and package-lock.json to automatically determine the project name and version.
Add the following flags to blackduck scanner when starting the shell script.
--detect.npm.include.dev.dependencies=false
--detect.npm.include.peer.dependencies=false
Example:
bash <(curl -s https://detect.synopsys.com/detect.sh) --blackduck.url="${BLACKDUCK_HUB_URL}" --blackduck.username="${BLACKDUCK_HUB_USER}" --blackduck.password="${BLACKDUCK_HUB_PASS}" --blackduck.trust.cert=true --detect.policy.check=true --detect.hub.signature.scanner.paths=./ --detect.npm.include.dev.dependencies=false --detect.npm.include.peer.dependencies=false
This will instruct blackduck scanner to not look at dev dependency and nested dependencies.
Additional notes
It is not necessary to use npm-forced-resolutions or yarn's selective dependency resolution; For future reference, npm's "override" function was not mentioned because it has not been implemented yet at the time this answer was written.
If you are using create-react-app, make sure react-scripts is moved from dependencies to devDependencies (as per Dan Abramov's recommendation to address this issue). You can do this by running npm uninstall react-scripts, then running npm install --save-dev react-scripts or npm install --save-dev react-scripts#<specific version>

Answer 2

first off let me point you to the Synopsys Community portal which is the best and quickest place to ask these questions and get answers https://community.synopsys.com/s/. Full disclose, I work at Synopsys and am involved with the Black Duck product.
Can I also ask if the version "5.6.2" you listed refers to the Synopsys Detect scanning tool or Black Duck itself? I ask as the latest version of Black Duck 2021.8.2 and detect 7.5.0 does support extracting the project version name from the yarn.lock and/or package.json, and you should not need to provide any additional parameters to have detect automatically pick this up.
One other thing to note is that generally you should be running the yarn command on your project prior to running detect. This produces more accurate analysis results within Black Duck and resolves the dependencies using your normal package manager tools. Which would mean detect will extract the project name and version information from the yarn.lock file not the package.json file. For more details, you can see this page here https://synopsys.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/INTDOCS/pages/631275892/Detectors