Strengthening Magento 2 Security in CI/CD Pipelines with Sansec Ecomscan

Sansec provides the gold standard for Magento 2 malware detection and security monitoring through its product Ecomscan. It offers comprehensive protection for Magento stores, including vulnerability scanning, malware detection, and real-time threat intelligence.

Most merchants and agencies rely only on Ecomscan running on their infrastructure to monitor live stores. However, far fewer teams take advantage of Ecomscan’s ability to be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. Where it can catch issues before they ever reach production. Integrating Ecomscan into your artifact security scanning pipelines ensures that no malicious code, supply-chain malware, or missing security patches make it into your deployable builds.

Why Run Ecomscan in CI/CD Pipelines?

Inroducing Ecomscan inside your build pipeline provides several substantial benefits:

1. Detect Malware in Build Artifacts

Ecomscan can identify malicious or unexpected code that ends up in the deployment bundle—whether it was:

accidentally committed by a developer,
introduced by a compromised Composer or npm package,
or added through a dependency confusion attack.

Given how common supply-chain compromises have become, this step is increasingly essential.

2. Enforce Security Patch Compliance

Magento regularly releases security patches. By scanning the artifact during CI, you can:

verify that the latest patches are applied
prevent releases if security requirements are not met
satisfy compliance frameworks that require proactive patch enforcement

3. Reinforce the “Build Once, Deploy Many” Principle

CI Pipeline Examples

Below are examples of how to integrate Ecomscan into common CI platforms for Magento 2 projects.

Build Once, Deploy Many Principle

An important part of these example pipelines is the “Build Once, Deploy Many” principle, as this ensures consistency between environments.

Build a single deployment artifact.
Run all tests—including Ecomscan—against that artifact.
Publish the same artifact to object storage.
Deploy it unchanged to staging and production.

Scanning the artifact itself (instead of the raw repo) guarantees you’re testing the exact code that will ship.

GitHub Actions Example

Sansec provides an official GitHub Action, making integration straightforward. Here is a pseudocode example on how to integrate Ecomscan into your GitHub Actions workflow for a Magento 2 project.

name: Magento 2 CI
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:
    # ... Build Deployment Artifact
  test-e2e-smoke-tests:
    name: E2E Smoke Tests
    needs: build
    # ... Run E2E Smoke Tests
  test-security-trufflehog:
    name: Trufflehog Secret Scanning
    needs: build
    # ... Run Trufflehog Secret Scanning
  test-security-ecomscan:
    name: Ecomscan Security Test
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: sansecio/ecomscan-github-action@main
        with:
          key: '${{ secrets.ECOMSCAN_API_KEY }}'
          directory: '.'
  upload-s3-deployment-artifact:
    needs:
      - test-e2e-smoke-tests
      - test-security-trufflehog
      - test-security-ecomscan
      # ... Upload Deployment Artifact to S3
  deploy-staging:
    name: Deploy Artifact to Staging
    needs: upload-s3-deployment-artifact
    # ... Handle staging deployment

Bitbucket Pipelines Example

While Sansec doesn’t provide an official Bitbucket Pipe, you can download and run Ecomscan directly during the pipeline.

Here is a pseudocode example of how to integrate Ecomscan into a Bitbucket Pipeline for a Magento 2 project:

definitions:
  steps:
    - step: &test-artifact-security-ecomscan
        name: Ecomscan Security Test
        image: acme-agency/magento-build-env:8.4
        artifacts:
          - artifacts/**
        script:
          - cd $BITBUCKET_CLONE_DIR
          - wget https://ecomscan.com/downloads/linux-amd64/ecomscan && chmod +x ecomscan
          - ./ecomscan --version
          - |
            output=$(./ecomscan --key=$ECOMSCAN_API_KEY --format=csv .)
            if [ -n "$output" ]; then
                echo "Security issues found:"
                echo "$output"
                exit 1
            fi
            echo "No security issues found."
            exit 0
pipelines:
  branches:
    master:
      - step: *build-deployment-artifact # Build the Magento deployment artifact
      - parallel:
        - step: *test-e2e-smoke-tests               # Run end-to-end smoke tests
        - step: *test-artifact-security-ecomscan.   # Run Ecomscan against built artifact
        - step: *test-artifact-security-trufflehog  # Run Trufflehog secret scanning
      - step: *upload-s3-deployment-artifact        # Package and upload artifact to S3
      - step: *deploy-staging-environment           # Deploy artifact to staging environment
  tags:
    '**':
      - step: *download-s3-deployment-artifact # Download staging artifact from S3
      - step: *deploy-production-environment   # Deploy artifact to production environment

Conclusion

Integrating Sansec Ecomscan into your Magento 2 CI/CD pipeline is an effective way to:

prevent supply-chain attacks,
strengthen security posture,
enforce Magento patch compliance,
and ensure that only clean, validated build artifacts reach production.

With minimal setup, you can significantly upgrade your deployment security and reduce the risk of compromised code making its way into your online stores.

Why Run Ecomscan in CI/CD Pipelines?#

1. Detect Malware in Build Artifacts#

2. Enforce Security Patch Compliance#

3. Reinforce the “Build Once, Deploy Many” Principle#

CI Pipeline Examples#

Build Once, Deploy Many Principle#

GitHub Actions Example#

Bitbucket Pipelines Example#

Conclusion#