A tool for building a responsible but practical supply chain security practice.
npm audit is great. npm audit fix is also there if you didn't know. But not everything can be fixed right away and you need to manage your security and make decisions about the dependencies you use.
I built audit-resolver after a few weeks of trying to run audit as a step in CI and failing each time there's a vulnerability. There were just too many irrelevant or unfixed ones and my team needed a way to manage the situation.
Audit resolver creates a audit-resolve.json file in your app and interactively helps you manage security of your dependencies.
You can decide what to ignore and for how long, or track what's been fixed before.
The audit-resolve.json file sits in the repository and you can see who decided to ignore what and when.
This package is meant for early adopters. Anything can change, but my team uses it for maintaining over 20 apps so there's likely to be a migration path.
I'm working on getting it built into npm. See the RFC
I'm participating in Package Vulnerability Management & Reporting Collaboration Space where I intend to donate parts of the audit-resolver's core.
npm7 has introduced significant changes to the audit output. Support for that is in a release candidate for v3.
You can try it out by installing npm-audit-resolver@next
Requires npm v6.1.0+ or yarn installed alongside
npm install -g npm-audit-resolver
Go into the project folder and run
resolve-audit
It goes through the results of npm audit and lets you decide what to do with the issues.
The decisions you make are stored in audit-resolve.json to keep track of it in version control and have a log of who decided to do what and when.
--yarn switch to calling yarn audit instead of npm audit.
--migrate forces migration to a new file and format even if no modifications are made to decisions
All other arguments are passed down to the npm/yarn audit call
One of the problems this solves is running audit as part of your build pipeline. You don't want to break your CI for a few days waiting to get a fix on a dependency, but at the same time ignoring the whole class of issues or the audit result entirely means you'll rarely notice it at all.
Run
check-audit
This command will only exit with an error if a human needs to make new decisions about vulnerabilities and commit the audit-resolve.json file. If all issues are addressed, your build can pass.
For JSON output (similar to npm audit --json), run
check-audit --json
All other arguments are passed down to the npm/yarn audit call
Want to give it a go? Download this repo and run npm run testdrive
When a vulnerability is found, you get to choose between the following options:
- fix - Runs the fix proposed by npm audit and makes a note. If the same issue comes back because someone else on the team changed package-lock.json, you'll get a warning about that.
- show details - Prints more information about the issues form the audit and asks what to do again
- remind in 24h - Lets you ignore an issue temporarily to make the build pass until a fix is known
- ignore - Adds the particular dependency paths and advisories to be ignored in the future. If the same issue in the same package comes up, but it's a dependency of another package, it won't get ignored. If a new issue is found in the package, it doesn't get ignored. You can decide if the decision expires or not.
- delete - Removes your dependency that brought the vulnerability in its dependencies.
- skip and quit, obviously
audit-resolve.json is formatted, so git history has a trace of who addressed which vulnerability, when and how.
Because otherwise running npm audit as part of your CI is not practical.
- dev dependencies! a DOS vulnerability in your test runner's dependency is not a showstopper
- build tooling vulnerability
- dependencies of a tool you use very narrowly and can prove it's safe
- new vulnerability without a fix and you want to wait for a fix while running your builds (there's a remind me in 24h option available)