Nil Pointer Dereference in Watcher Executor -> dereference panic.

Open Beginner friendly
#475 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
84/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
go
Domain
cli

Research direction

Read pkg/watcher/executor.go and start at TriggerImport, following the connectors.NewClient error path before mc.UploadArtifact is called. Reproduce the issue with an invalid or expired context and a watched-file change, then verify the watcher handles the client failure without a nil-pointer panic.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

stale
Describe the bug
Diagram
sequenceDiagram
    participant Watcher
    participant Executor
    participant Client as connectors.NewClient
    Watcher->>Executor: TriggerImport(entry)
    Executor->>Client: NewClient(*globalClientOpts)
    Note over Client: Fails (e.g. invalid context)
    Client-->>Executor: nil, err
    Note over Executor: Logs error, but DOES NOT return!
    Executor->>Executor: mc.UploadArtifact(entry.FilePath, entry.MainArtifact)
    Note over Executor: Panic: nil pointer dereference (mc is nil)
Description

In pkg/watcher/executor.go, the TriggerImport function instantiates the Microcks client using connectors.NewClient. If this fails (e.g., due to an invalid context or server address), it prints an error message but continues execution instead of returning early. It subsequently calls mc.UploadArtifact(), causing a nil pointer dereference panic.

Impact

The watcher daemon crashes with a stack trace instead of handling the connection/context resolution failure gracefully.

Steps to Reproduce
  1. Configure a watch entry with an invalid or expired context.
  2. Modify the watched file to trigger an fsnotify event.
  3. The watch manager invokes TriggerImport, which prints [ERROR] Cannot connect to Microcks client... and immediately panics with a segmentation fault.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
52
Forks
67
Avg merge
1d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
13

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