Frequently Asked Questions
Anchore Troubleshooting FAQs
For each of the following frequently asked questions, read the General Troubleshooting Approach Guide first, then following the data from there, follow the query specific answers below.
- Unauthorized error when using the Anchore CLI
- No vulnerability results for an analyzed image
- My image will not analyze
- Unable to access private registry
- Anchore Engine container keeps exiting
Note: As stated in the General Troubleshooting Approach Guide, passing the --debug option to any Anchore CLI command can often help narrow down particular issues.
Unauthorized error when using the Anchore CLI
If you run into an "Unauthorized" error, verify you have configured the Anchore CLI correctly, as this error is most commonly seen when the Username, Password, or Service URL are improperly set.
By default the Anchore CLI will try to connect to the Anchore Engine at http://localhost:8228/v1 with no authentication. The username, password and URL for the server can be passed to the Anchore CLI as command line arguments.
--u TEXT Username eg. admin (default)
--p TEXT Password eg. foobar (default)
--url TEXT Service URL eg. http://localhost:8228/v1
Rather than passing these parameters for every call to the cli they can be stores as environment variables.
ANCHORE_CLI_URL=http://myserver.example.com:8228/v1
ANCHORE_CLI_USER=admin
ANCHORE_CLI_PASS=foobar
Note: When passing the parameters through the command line, order matters. For example, anchore-cli --url http://localhost:8228/v1 --u admin --p foobar system status
No vulnerability results for an analyzed image
In order to return vulnerability results on analyzed images feed data must be synced.
Verifying feed data
The following command will report a list of feeds synced by Anchore: anchore-cli system feeds list
anchore-cli system feeds list
Feed Group LastSync RecordCount
nvd nvddb:2002 2019-02-25T21:35:12.802608 6745
nvd nvddb:2003 2019-02-25T21:35:13.188204 1547
nvd nvddb:2004 2019-02-25T21:35:13.774093 2702
nvd nvddb:2005 2019-02-25T21:35:14.281344 4749
nvd nvddb:2006 2019-02-25T21:39:01.936476 7127
nvd nvddb:2007 2019-02-25T21:39:02.432799 6556
nvd nvddb:2008 2019-02-25T22:29:19.704624 7147
nvd nvddb:2009 2019-02-25T22:29:20.292788 4964
nvd nvddb:2010 2019-02-25T22:29:20.720235 5073
nvd nvddb:2011 2019-02-25T21:30:43.003078 4621
nvd nvddb:2012 2019-02-25T21:35:11.663650 5549
nvd nvddb:2013 2019-02-25T21:39:01.289722 6160
nvd nvddb:2014 2019-02-25T21:42:11.148478 8493
nvd nvddb:2015 2019-02-25T21:44:55.773423 8023
nvd nvddb:2016 2019-02-25T21:48:13.150698 9872
nvd nvddb:2017 2019-02-25T22:03:35.550272 15162
nvd nvddb:2018 2019-02-25T22:26:12.131914 13541
nvd nvddb:2019 2019-02-25T22:29:19.116614 963
vulnerabilities alpine:3.3 2019-04-28T13:04:11.054665 457
vulnerabilities alpine:3.4 2019-04-28T13:04:11.283342 681
vulnerabilities alpine:3.5 2019-04-28T13:04:10.741848 875
vulnerabilities alpine:3.6 2019-04-28T13:04:13.506188 1051
vulnerabilities alpine:3.7 2019-04-28T13:04:10.510544 1125
vulnerabilities alpine:3.8 2019-04-28T13:04:08.909376 1220
vulnerabilities alpine:3.9 2019-04-28T13:04:08.308430 1218
vulnerabilities amzn:2 2019-04-28T13:04:14.120807 163
vulnerabilities centos:5 2019-04-28T13:04:10.278929 1323
vulnerabilities centos:6 2019-04-28T13:04:12.089106 1328
vulnerabilities centos:7 2019-04-28T13:04:13.261358 778
vulnerabilities debian:10 2019-04-28T13:04:12.408950 20095
vulnerabilities debian:7 2019-04-28T13:04:12.643238 20455
vulnerabilities debian:8 2019-04-28T13:04:15.673385 21557
vulnerabilities debian:9 2019-04-28T13:04:07.625729 20319
vulnerabilities debian:unstable 2019-04-28T13:04:13.900741 20952
vulnerabilities ol:5 2019-04-28T13:04:14.578852 1230
vulnerabilities ol:6 2019-04-28T13:04:11.595896 1401
vulnerabilities ol:7 2019-04-28T13:04:11.857659 889
vulnerabilities ubuntu:12.04 2019-04-28T13:04:09.166082 14948
vulnerabilities ubuntu:12.10 2019-04-28T13:04:07.207705 5652
vulnerabilities ubuntu:13.04 2019-04-28T13:04:09.730803 4127
vulnerabilities ubuntu:14.04 2019-04-28T13:04:10.044314 18504
vulnerabilities ubuntu:14.10 2019-04-28T13:04:14.350013 4456
vulnerabilities ubuntu:15.04 2019-04-28T13:04:07.980058 5789
vulnerabilities ubuntu:15.10 2019-04-28T13:04:16.144666 6513
vulnerabilities ubuntu:16.04 2019-04-28T13:04:12.989542 15484
vulnerabilities ubuntu:16.10 2019-04-28T13:04:14.885677 8647
vulnerabilities ubuntu:17.04 2019-04-28T13:04:15.133018 9157
vulnerabilities ubuntu:17.10 2019-04-28T13:04:15.914109 7935
vulnerabilities ubuntu:18.04 2019-04-28T13:04:09.501847 9736
vulnerabilities ubuntu:18.10 2019-04-28T13:04:15.418772 7823
vulnerabilities ubuntu:19.04 2019-04-28T13:04:08.653333 6274
Waiting for Anchore feed data to sync
Note: Upon a fresh installation of Anchore Engine, the system will take some time to bootstrap. CVE data for Linux distributions such as Alpine, CentOS, Debian, Oracle, Red Hat and Ubuntu will be downloaded. The initial sync may take anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes depending on the speed of your network connection.
You can run the following command to wait until Anchore Engine is available and ready. This can be useful when waiting for vulnerability data to sync on intial installation. anchore-cli system wait
# Blocking operation that will return when anchore-engine is available and ready
[email protected]:/anchore-engine# anchore-cli system wait
Starting checks to wait for anchore-engine to be available timeout=-1.0 interval=5.0
API availability: Checking anchore-engine URL (http://localhost:8228)...
API availability: Success.
Service availability: Checking for service set (catalog,apiext,policy_engine,simplequeue,analyzer)...
Service availability: Success.
Feed sync: Checking sync completion for feed set (vulnerabilities)...
Feed sync: Success.
Logs
If you are running into feed sync failures a good place to begin investigation is the the policy engine service logs (/var/log/anchore/anchore-policy-engine.log)
My image will not analyze
Image analysis is performed as a distinct, asynchronous, and scheduled task driven by queues that analyzer workers periodically poll. Image records have a small state-machine as follows:
Note: In order for an image to move from ‘not_analyzed’ to ‘analyzing’, you need a healthy catalog, simplequeue, and analyzer service up and running. See the verifying services section in the General Troubleshooting Approach Guide for more information.
Logs
If you run into issues with images failing analysis a good place to start inspecting is the analyzer logs (/var/log/anchore/anchore-worker.log)
The analyzer is the only component that can set an image state to ‘analysis_failed’, so you should be able to see a record of what happened.
Unable to access private registry
Anchore Engine will attempt to download images from any registry without requiring further configuration. However if your registry requires authentication then the registry and corresponding credentials will need to be defined.
The –insecure option
Anchore Engine will only pull images from a TLS/SSL enabled registry. If the registry is protected with a self signed certificate or a certificated signed by an unknown certificate authority then the --insecure option can be passed which instructs the Anchore Engine not to validate the certificate.
anchore-cli registry add REGISTRY USERNAME PASSWORD --insecure
The –skip-validate option
Anchore Engine attempts to perform a credential validation upon registry addition, but there are cases where a credential can be valid but the validation routine can fail (in particular, credential validation methods are changing for public registries over time). If you are unable to add a registry but believe that the credential you are providing is valid, or you wish to add a credential to anchore before it is in place in the registry, you can bypass the registry credential validation process using the --skip-validate option to the ‘registry add’ command.
anchore-cli registry add REGISTRY USERNAME PASSWORD --skip-validate
Anchore Engine container keeps exiting
The first step here should be to inspect the logs for the exited container. For Docker, running docker logs <exited container id> should return the reason the container exited.
If you see [MainThread] [anchore_manager.cli.service/start()] [ERROR] Error: cannot locate configuration file (/config/config.yaml) in the logs, you should verify you have set up the directory for your Anchore installation correctly.
If you are following the Anchore engine quickstart guide, your directory structure should look like the following:
cd ~/aevolume
# find .
.
./config
./config/config.yaml
./db
./docker-compose.yaml
If you still see the above error, take a look at the docker-compose.yaml file and confirm that the config volume mount definition is correct.
Example:
volumes:
- ./config:/config/:z
Note: If you are following the quickstart guide, you should not need to make any modifications to the configuration files, they are designed to work out of the box.
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