crowdsecurity/crowdsec · error

description is mandatory

Error message

description is mandatory

What it means

Validation failure in leaky-bucket Validate (reached via LoadBucket): the scenario's description field is mandatory and was empty. The bucket cannot be loaded because alert output requires a description.

Source

Thrown at pkg/leakybucket/manager_load.go:85

	leakspeed           time.Duration       // internal representation of `Leakspeed`
	duration            time.Duration       // internal representation of `Duration`
	ret                 chan pipeline.Event // the bucket-specific output chan for overflows
	processors          []Processor         // processors is the list of hooks for pour/overflow/create (cf. uniq, blackhole etc.)
	scenarioHash        string
	Simulated           bool                // Set to true if the scenario instantiating the bucket was in the exclusion list
	orderEvent          bool
}

// we use one NameGenerator for all the future buckets
var seed = namegenerator.NewNameGenerator(time.Now().UTC().UnixNano())

func (f *BucketFactory) Validate() error {
	if f.Spec.Name == "" {
		return errors.New("bucket must have name")
	}

	if f.Spec.Description == "" {
		return errors.New("description is mandatory")
	}

	impl, ok := bucketTypes[f.Spec.Type]
	if !ok {
		return fmt.Errorf("unknown bucket type '%s'", f.Spec.Type)
	}

	if err := impl.Validate(f); err != nil {
		return fmt.Errorf("%s bucket: %w", f.Spec.Type, err)
	}

	return f.Spec.ScopeType.CompileFilter()
}

type SimulationChecker interface {
	IsSimulated(scenario string) bool
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 909b515798)

Solutions

1. Add a meaningful `description:` line to the bucket YAML
2. Resubmit/validate with hubtest tooling before publishing

Example fix

# before
name: my/scenario
type: leaky
# after
name: my/scenario
description: Brute force on ssh
type: leaky

if bucket.Spec.Description == "" {
    return errors.New("scenario must define a description")
}

When it happens

Trigger: Loading a bucket config where `description:` is absent or empty string, via LoadBucket validation.

Common situations: Community scenario submissions missing the mandatory description, or generated configs omitting it.

Understand the failure class

Background: "is required", "must be set", "missing required field": configuration validation errors across open-source libraries — this error's family across 36 libraries.

Related errors

• bucket must have name
• invalid threshold: must be > 0 and <= 1
• capacity must be -1
• nameless bucket
• missing filter directive

AI-assisted analysis of crowdsecurity/crowdsec@909b515798 (2026-09-06). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7db6a92f03ba2b35. Report an issue: GitHub.