When Bombocat Crashes Your CI Pipeline 🐱💥

Octt

When Bombocat Crashes Your CI Pipeline

Or: How a feline saboteur forced us to build the ultimate essential quarantine protocol — and the valuable lessons we learned along the way.

Last Tuesday, our usually rock-solid Jenkins build exploded… literally. An ominous log entry blinked before our very eyes:

💣 cat detected
10…9…8…

Suddenly, what should have been a routine build turned into a full-blown panic-room scenario. Our culprit? Bombocat — a once-harmless code fixture turned combustible critter that had nested itself in our Docker image and was primed to detonate C4 instead of installing our base dependencies.

The Legend of Bombocat

Bombocat’s origin story dates back to a dusty fork from 2020, where a misnamed test fixture (bombocat_cargo/) first appeared. No one noticed… until it slipped into our monorepo during a late-night refactor. Hungry for untested code, this creature lay dormant until the precise moment our CI pipeline was vulnerable — triggering a catastrophic “Kaboom” that wiped out our unit tests and morale in one fell swoop.

Quarantine Protocol: The Pre-Commit Hook

After an emergency all-hands meeting (complete with pizza and goggles), we codified our defenses into a bash script, which will prove to be an invaluable element of protection. Below is the pre-commit hook that now guards every commit against Bombocat incursions:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# .git/hooks/pre-commit — Bombocat Quarantine Script

SIG_PATTERN="bombocat_cargo|import Bombocat|💣"

echo "🔍 Scanning for Bombocat payloads in staged files…"

# Check all staged files for the signature pattern
if git diff --cached --name-only | xargs grep -H -E "$SIG_PATTERN" &>/dev/null
then
  echo "💥 ALERT: Bombocat signature found in staged changes!"
  echo "   • Quarantining suspicious files into /quarantine_bombocat/"
  mkdir -p quarantine_bombocat
  git diff --cached --name-only | grep -E "$SIG_PATTERN" \
    | xargs -I{} mv {} quarantine_bombocat/
  echo "🚫 Commit aborted to prevent explosive side-effects."
  exit 1
else
  echo "✅ No Bombocat traces detected. Safe to commit."
  exit 0
fi

Once installed and settled, any attempt to commit files matching our Bombocat signature is automatically halted, the offending files are moved to quarantine_bombocat/, and the team is alerted in Slack to dispatch a rescue squad as soon as possible, to allow for our integration and delivery to be actually continuous.

The Midnight Rescue Crew

At 3:12 AM, Carlos “Fuse-Finder” Ramirez, our DevOps Lead, was the first to detect that ominous fuse ticking in the Jenkins logs — coffee still in hand, he declared, “That’s no cat. That’s an incoming payload!” He rallied the team, and Anika “Firewall” Singh, our SRE specialist, cranked out the quarantine hook in record time. Meanwhile, Marco “Reflector” Li, our QA engineer, traced every “Kaboom” back to its origin branch, mapping the blast radius of those red-failing tests. Their quick thinking — and a steady supply of pizza — saved our pipeline and solidified a new internal legend.

Wrapping Up: From Catastrophe to Continuous Improvement

With our quarantine protocol live, we’ve staved off three weeks of potential gunpowder-based cat-astrophes. And, in spite of the hardships, along the way we’ve learned to:

Automate the Funny Hacks: If you joke about a check, turn it into a real CI gate.
Name with Care: A misnamed fixture can spawn legendary beasts.
Celebrate the Heroes: Midnight rescues deserve shout-outs — and pizza parties.
Monitor & Alert: Hook your scripts into Slack or PagerDuty so no fuse goes unnoticed.
Prepare for the Next Evolution: Who knows — Bombocat v2.0 might be Bombodog.

I’ve since adopted the self-appointed title of “Bombocat Exterminator”, a distinction I wear with unexpected pride, albeit I do recognize its slight cheesiness.

Ready to share your own CI gremlin war story? Drop a comment or connect with me to swap tales of wild pipelines, heroic teammates, and the next beast we’ll conquer together — maybe next time it won't even be as easy as fighting a domestic mammal.