Understand Vibgrate Exit Codes for Scripting and CI

Exit codes are how a scan becomes a quality gate. Vibgrate returns a non-zero exit code when a configured gate is breached, which lets shell scripts and CI pipelines block on drift. This tutorial shows how to drive exit codes with --fail-on and --drift-budget.

Prerequisites

• Vibgrate CLI installed
• Basic shell scripting familiarity

Steps

1. Run a scan and check the exit code

With no gate configured, a scan exits 0 after printing the table and DriftScore.

vg

2. Fail on a severity

Make the scan exit non-zero when findings at or above a severity are present.

vg scan --fail-on error

3. Fail on a drift budget

Gate on the DriftScore by setting a drift budget. The scan fails when the score exceeds your budget.

vg scan --drift-budget 60

4. Branch in a shell script

Inspect the exit code with $? and branch on it.

vg scan --fail-on error
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "drift gate failed"; fi

5. Use exit codes in CI

In CI, a non-zero exit code automatically fails the job, so adding --fail-on or --drift-budget turns the scan into a merge gate without extra wiring.

Verification

With no gate, echo $? after a scan prints 0. With --fail-on error or --drift-budget, the exit code is non-zero when the gate is breached and 0 otherwise. Confirm the values match your expectations on a known-good and known-bad project.

Next Steps

• Wire the gate into a pipeline with the GitHub Actions tutorial.
• Track the score over time with vg baseline.
• Produce SARIF for code scanning alongside the gate.