fossa test "issues found" license/policy failure in CI

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

fossa test polled the FOSSA API for the revision analyzed by fossa analyze and found license or policy issues, so it printed the issue list and exited non-zero to block the pipeline.

What this error means

After a successful analyze, fossa test lists dependencies with policy or license violations and exits 1. The issues also appear in the FOSSA web UI for that revision.

[ERROR] Test failed. Number of issues found: 3
  * gpl-lib@2.0.0: Flagged by policy (Denied license: GPL-3.0)
  Visit the FOSSA dashboard to review the issues.

Common causes

A dependency violates the FOSSA policy

Your organization policy denies a license (for example GPL) or flags a security issue, and a scanned dependency matches, so the test gate fails.

A flagged issue is not yet resolved or ignored

The issue exists in the FOSSA UI and has not been triaged (resolved, or marked as ignored/approved), so it keeps failing the test.

How to fix it

Triage the issue in FOSSA

1. Open the FOSSA dashboard for the failing revision.
2. Resolve, ignore, or approve each flagged dependency per your policy.
3. Re-run fossa test so the gate reflects the triaged state.

# analyze then gate on the same revision
fossa analyze
fossa test

Remove or replace the offending dependency

If the license truly cannot be used, swap the dependency for a permissively licensed alternative so no issue is raised.

# after replacing the dep, re-scan
fossa analyze && fossa test

How to prevent it

• Run fossa test on every PR so violations are caught before merge.
• Keep the FOSSA policy in sync with what legal actually allows.
• Triage new issues promptly instead of letting the gate stay red.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions documentation