Evaluate trails with OPA policies

Learn how to use kosli evaluate trail and kosli evaluate trails to check your Kosli trails against custom OPA/Rego policies. This tutorial walks through writing a policy that verifies pull requests have been approved.

The kosli evaluate commands let you evaluate Kosli trails against custom policies written in Rego. This is useful for enforcing rules like “every artifact must have an approved pull request” or “all security scans must pass”, and for gating deployments in CI/CD pipelines based on those rules.

In this tutorial, we’ll write a policy that checks whether pull requests on a trail have been approved, then evaluate it against real trails in public Kosli orgs.

1. Prerequisites

   To follow this tutorial, you need to:

   • Install Kosli CLI.

   • Get a Kosli API token.

   • Set the KOSLI_API_TOKEN environment variable to your token:

     export KOSLI_API_TOKEN=<your-api-token>
     

   You don’t need OPA installed — the Kosli CLI has a built-in Rego evaluator. You just need to write a .rego policy file.

2. Write a policy

   Create a file called pr-approved.rego with the following content:

   pr-approved.rego

   package policy
   
   import rego.v1
   
   default allow = false
   
   violations contains msg if {
       some trail in input.trails
       some pr in trail.compliance_status.attestations_statuses["pull-request"].pull_requests
       count(pr.approvers) == 0
       msg := sprintf("trail '%v': pull-request %v has no approvers", [trail.name, pr.url])
   }
   
   allow if {
       count(violations) == 0
   }
   

   Let’s break down what this policy does:

   • package policy — every evaluate policy must use the policy package.
   • import rego.v1 — use Rego v1 syntax (the if/contains keywords).
   • default allow = false — trails are denied unless explicitly allowed.
   • violations — a set of messages describing why the policy failed. The rule iterates over trails, then over pull requests within the pull-request attestation, looking for PRs where approvers is empty.
   • allow — trails are allowed only when there are no violations.

   See the Rego Policy reference for the full policy contract, input data shape, and exit code behaviour.

3. Evaluate multiple trails

   Let’s evaluate several trails from the public cyber-dojo org against our policy. The kosli evaluate trails command fetches trail data from Kosli and passes it to the policy as input.trails:

   kosli evaluate trails \
     --policy pr-approved.rego \
     --org cyber-dojo \
     --flow dashboard-ci \
     9978a1ca82c273a68afaa85fc37dd60d1e394f84 \
     b334d371eb85c9a5c811776de1b65fb80b52d952 \
     5abd63aa1d64af7be5b5900af974dc73ae425bd6 \
     cb3ec71f5ce1103779009abaf4e8f8a3ed97d813
   

   The cyber-dojo project doesn’t require PR approvals, so you’ll see violations:

   RESULT:      DENIED
   VIOLATIONS:  trail '5abd63aa1d64af7be5b5900af974dc73ae425bd6': pull-request https://github.com/cyber-dojo/dashboard/pull/342 has no approvers
                trail '9978a1ca82c273a68afaa85fc37dd60d1e394f84': pull-request https://github.com/cyber-dojo/dashboard/pull/344 has no approvers
                trail 'b334d371eb85c9a5c811776de1b65fb80b52d952': pull-request https://github.com/cyber-dojo/dashboard/pull/343 has no approvers
                trail 'cb3ec71f5ce1103779009abaf4e8f8a3ed97d813': pull-request https://github.com/cyber-dojo/dashboard/pull/341 has no approvers
   

   Now try the kosli-public org, where PRs do have approvers:

   kosli evaluate trails \
     --policy pr-approved.rego \
     --org kosli-public \
     --flow cli \
     5a0f3c0 \
     167ed93 \
     030cc31
   

   RESULT:  ALLOWED
   
4. Evaluate a single trail

   The kosli evaluate trail (singular) command evaluates facts within a single trail, which is a different use case from comparing across multiple trails. For example, you might check that a snyk container scan found no high-severity vulnerabilities.

   Save this as snyk-no-high-vulns.rego:

   package policy
   
   import rego.v1
   
   default allow = false
   
   violations contains msg if {
       some name, artifact in input.trail.compliance_status.artifacts_statuses
       snyk := artifact.attestations_statuses["snyk-container-scan"]
       some result in snyk.processed_snyk_results.results
       result.high_count > 0
       msg := sprintf("artifact '%v': snyk container scan found %d high severity vulnerabilities", [name, result.high_count])
   }
   
   allow if {
       count(violations) == 0
   }
   

   This policy iterates over every artifact in the trail, looks up its snyk-container-scan attestation, and checks whether any result has a non-zero high_count.

   Use --attestations to enrich only the snyk data (faster than fetching all attestation details). The value uses the format artifact-name.attestation-type. Here, dashboard is the artifact name and snyk-container-scan is the attestation name:

   kosli evaluate trail \
     --policy snyk-no-high-vulns.rego \
     --org cyber-dojo \
     --flow dashboard-ci \
     --attestations dashboard.snyk-container-scan \
     44ca5fa2630947cf375fdbda10972a4bedaaaba3
   

   RESULT:  ALLOWED
   

   The trail has zero high-severity vulnerabilities, so the policy allows it.

   The input.trail / input.trails distinction and the full input data shape are documented in the Rego Policy reference.

5. Explore the policy input with --show-input

   When writing policies, it helps to see exactly what data is available. Use --show-input combined with --output json to see the full input that gets passed to the policy:

   kosli evaluate trail \
     --policy snyk-no-high-vulns.rego \
     --org cyber-dojo \
     --flow dashboard-ci \
     --attestations dashboard.snyk-container-scan \
     --show-input \
     --output json \
     44ca5fa2630947cf375fdbda10972a4bedaaaba3
   

   This outputs the evaluation result along with the complete input object. You can pipe it through jq to explore the structure:

   kosli evaluate trail \
     --policy snyk-no-high-vulns.rego \
     --org cyber-dojo \
     --flow dashboard-ci \
     --attestations dashboard.snyk-container-scan \
     --show-input \
     --output json \
     44ca5fa2630947cf375fdbda10972a4bedaaaba3 2>/dev/null | jq '.input.trail.compliance_status | keys'
   

   [
     "artifacts_statuses",
     "attestations_statuses",
     "evaluated_at",
     "flow_template_id",
     "is_compliant",
     "status"
   ]
   

   Use the --attestations flag to limit which attestations are enriched with full detail. The flag filters by attestation name (not type). For example, --attestations pull-request fetches only details for attestations named pull-request, which speeds up evaluation and reduces noise when exploring the input.

6. Use in CI/CD

   The kosli evaluate commands exit with 0 on allow and 1 on deny or error — making them straightforward to use as pipeline gates. See the Rego Policy reference for details on distinguishing denial from command failure.

   # Example: gate a deployment on policy evaluation
   if kosli evaluate trail \
     --policy policies/pr-approved.rego \
     --org "$KOSLI_ORG" \
     --flow "$FLOW_NAME" \
     "$GIT_COMMIT"; then
     echo "Policy passed — proceeding with deployment"
     # ... deploy commands ...
   else
     echo "Policy denied — blocking deployment"
     exit 1
   fi
   

   This pattern lets you enforce custom compliance rules as part of your delivery pipeline, using the same trail data that Kosli already collects.

7. Record the evaluation

   After evaluating a trail, you can record the result as an attestation. This creates an audit record in Kosli that captures the policy, the full evaluation report, and any violations.

   This step requires write access to your Kosli org. The examples below use variables you’d set in your CI/CD pipeline. In your own pipeline you’d use your own policy file — here we use my-policy.rego as a placeholder:

   # Run the evaluation and save the full JSON report to a file
   # (|| true prevents the step from failing when the policy denies)
   kosli evaluate trail "$TRAIL_NAME" \
     --policy my-policy.rego \
     --org "$KOSLI_ORG" \
     --flow "$FLOW_NAME" \
     --show-input \
     --output json > eval-report.json 2>/dev/null || true
   
   # Read the allow/deny result from the report
   is_compliant=$(jq -r '.allow' eval-report.json)
   
   # Extract violations as structured user-data
   jq '{violations: .violations}' eval-report.json > eval-violations.json
   
   # Attest the result
   kosli attest generic \
     --name opa-evaluation \
     --flow "$FLOW_NAME" \
     --trail "$TRAIL_NAME" \
     --org "$KOSLI_ORG" \
     --compliant="$is_compliant" \
     --attachments my-policy.rego,eval-report.json \
     --user-data eval-violations.json
   

   This creates a generic attestation on the trail with:

   • --compliant set based on whether the policy allowed or denied — read directly from the JSON report rather than relying on the exit code, which avoids issues with set -e in CI environments like GitHub Actions
   • --attachments containing the Rego policy (for reproducibility) and the full JSON evaluation report (including the input data the policy evaluated)
   • --user-data containing the violations, which appear in the Kosli UI as structured metadata on the attestation

   Use --compliant=value (with =) not --compliant value (with a space). Boolean flags in Kosli CLI require the = syntax when passing false — otherwise false is interpreted as a positional argument.

What you’ve accomplished

You have written OPA/Rego policies and evaluated Kosli trails against them, both across multiple trails and within a single trail. You’ve also recorded evaluation results as attestations, creating a tamper-proof audit record of every policy decision linked to a specific trail.

From here you can:

• Explore evaluated trails in the Kosli app
• Gate deployments in CI/CD pipelines using kosli evaluate trail exit codes
• Extend your policies to check other attestation types. See kosli evaluate trail and kosli evaluate trails for the full flag reference