Skip to main content

CAP.L0.MISSING_TOOL — an amplifier was registered and did not answer

  • Category: safety
  • Level: 0
  • Stability: stable
  • Suites: audit

SQLens leans on a few external tools it does not ship. Each one is an amplifier: the core checks run without it, and installing it adds checks SQLens has no rule of its own for.

This notice says one of them was registered and could not run.

Why it is a finding rather than a skip​

Because the alternative is invisible. A run that quietly left out an amplifier's checks produces the same report as a run that had it and found nothing — same summary, same exit code, same green. The absence would cost you coverage without ever costing you a line of output.

So it is reported, under its own id, with a sentence naming what the tool would have added. The run is smaller and says so.

The reason is specific, because the fix is​

Four absences look alike and are not:

  • not installed — install it, or point path at it
  • a pinned path that does not run — the path in your configuration named a file that is not executable. SQLens does not quietly fall back to $PATH: naming a path is a statement about which binary, so a broken pin is reported rather than worked around
  • a binary that will not say what it is — it answered --version with something SQLens does not recognize, so which build it is cannot be established
  • a version outside the measured window — it ran, but its output shape is one nobody measured, and a mapper reading a field that moved does not fail. It reports nothing and looks clean doing it

A fifth case is not a fixable absence at all: a tool with no build for this platform degrades with its own reason and never fails a strict run. Failing a build for something nobody on that platform can install is a gate nobody can pass.

Under a strict profile​

With strict tools on, a fixable absence ends the run as a misconfiguration instead of degrading. That is the setting for a pipeline that means "every amplifier, or tell me" — and it deliberately does not fire for the platform case above.