Ruby (build-mode=none) default-setup analysis fails with "no source code was seen" on pull_request events, but succeeds on push — traced to --no-calculate-baseline
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Tech stack
- github-actions, ruby, typescript
Research direction
Start with the Ruby build-mode=none path in tools/autobuild.sh and the referenced index-files.sh, then compare the database init and extraction logs for push and pull_request runs. Reproduce the one-file Ruby case with and without baseline calculation and verify whether pull_request extraction indexes the file and completes database finalization.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Summary
On a private monorepo using default setup with ruby enabled (alongside several other languages), the Analyze (ruby) job fails on every pull_request-triggered scan with:
CodeQL could not process any code written in Ruby. For more information, review our troubleshooting guide at
https://gh.io/troubleshooting-code-scanning/no-source-code-seen-during-build .
##[error]Encountered a fatal error while running "codeql database finalize --finalize-dataset ... /ruby". Exit code was 32
The same commit, scanned via a push event (default-setup scan of the default branch), succeeds and correctly finds/indexes the Ruby source. So this isn't "no Ruby code exists" — it's event-type-dependent behavior for the same tree.
Repro shape
- CodeQL CLI 2.26.2,
codeql-actiondefault (dynamic) setup,build-mode=none(Ruby, since it's interpreted). - Repo has exactly one
.rbfile, and noGemfile/Rakefile/.ruby-version/.gemspecanywhere else in the tree (the one file is a Homebrew Formula, so no surrounding Ruby project scaffolding). - The
.rbfile is present at the head commit in both cases (verified viagit ls-treeagainst the exact SHA each job checked out) — this isn't a stale-branch/missing-file situation.
Root cause (found via job-log diff)
Diffing the two codeql database init invocations for the same language on the two event types:
push (succeeds):
codeql database init ... --calculate-language-specific-baseline --sublanguage-file-coverage --language=ruby --codescanning-config=... --build-mode=none
Extraction then proceeds:
Scanning for files in <source-root>...
<db>: Indexing files in <source-root>...
Running command in <source-root>: [.../ruby/tools/index-files.sh, .../files-to-index<N>.list]
pull_request (fails):
codeql database init ... --no-calculate-baseline --language=ruby --codescanning-config=... --build-mode=none
Extraction stops right after the first line:
Scanning for files in <source-root>...
— no Indexing files in..., no index-files.sh invocation, no file list is ever produced. codeql database finalize then reports zero files and fails.
--no-calculate-baseline vs --calculate-language-specific-baseline --sublanguage-file-coverage is the only difference between the two invocations. Per the codeql-action changelog, skipping file-coverage collection on pull_request events is an intentional, recent (~April 2026) performance change. The CLI version info on the failing run also carries a suppressesMissingFileBaselineWarning feature flag, suggesting file-discovery and baseline/coverage computation are coupled somewhere in this path for at least the Ruby extractor under build-mode=none.
Hypothesis
For the Ruby extractor's build-mode=none autobuild (tools/autobuild.sh), file discovery for indexing appears to be driven by (or gated on) the same computation that produces the file-coverage baseline. When that computation is skipped (now the default on pull_request events), index-files.sh never runs, so the extractor indexes zero files — independent of what's actually in the checkout. This doesn't seem to affect other configured languages in the same repo (Python, JS/TS, Go, Java/Kotlin, Actions) — plausibly because they have real build/trace-based discovery or enough files/pre-existing baseline state that the gap doesn't surface the same way. It seems most likely to bite a language with very few files and build-mode=none.
Ask
- Is file-discovery for
build-mode=nonelanguages supposed to depend on baseline/coverage calculation? If not, this looks like an unintended regression from the file-coverage-on-PR change. - Is there a documented workaround short of disabling the language entirely for default setup (which is what we're doing in the interim)?
Happy to provide additional (sanitized) log excerpts if useful — the repo itself is private, so I can't link the actual run, but the command-line diff above is copied verbatim from both jobs' logs.
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
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- Forks
- 493
- Avg merge
- 1d 13h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 44
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
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