npm audit resolver

Now with yarn support too

npm audit is great. npm audit fix is also there if you didn't know. But sometimes you need to manage your security and make decisions about the dependencies you use.

This tool creates a audit-resolve.json file in your app and interactively helps you manage security of your dependencies.

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

Install

Requires npm v6.1.0+ installed alongside

npm install -g npm-audit-resolver

Usage

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.

Arguments

--yarn switched to yarn package manager as the command to support
--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

Running in CI

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

Features

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.

Why would I ignore security vulnerabilities?

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)