In some situations, you might see HawkScan printing an excessive amount of characters or extra lines when running. This can make it difficult to read and could ultimately result in undesirable behavior. Read on below to find out why this happens and how to fix it!
Progress Bar
With the release of HawkScan 3.3.0, we introduced a CLI progress bar that appears within the terminal and provides you with a visual of HawkScan spidering your application. HawkScan uses a stream of control characters that, when outputted in the terminal, gives the visualization of a progress bar.
When this is run in a "Non-Interactive" terminal (Commonly used in CI/CD environments), it is unable to interpret the control characters and output them as a visualization. Because of this, it captures and prints the control characters in order. Ultimately creating excessive line noise in the HawkScan output. This can make it difficult to read, and if the output is large enough, can result in timeouts.
This often appears as below.
* Authentication succeeded *
Test path /user returned a successful match
·[?25l
·[1A
·[1A
·[1A
To remediate this issue, we have introduced a --no-progress CLI flag. Using this flag will completely disable the progress bar from being used in the HawkScan output.
Color
Similar to the progress bar in the HawkScan output, control characters are also used for color marking in terminals (Color Escape Sequences). These control characters tell the terminal where and what color to use and then prints that in its output.
Just like the progress bar, Non-Interactive terminals commonly used in CI/CD are unable to interpret these control characters. Because of this, the characters themselves will be printed, which can cause extra noise when HawkScan is running.
By adding the --no-color CLI flag, you can disable HawkScan from using colors in its output.
Conclusion
We recommend using both the --no-progress and --no-color flags whenever running HawkScan in a CI/CD environment. Because they commonly use Non-Interactive terminals that are unable to interpret control characters, this can create a lot of extra and undesirable noise. If this extra noise gets large enough, it can potentially result in a timeout.
Additional Resources
If you still are seeing issues or have further questions, don't hesitate to contact our Support Team! We would be more than happy to take a deeper look and see what we can do to improve your results.
You can contact us by emailing support@stackhawk.com or by using the chat widget on our website!