enquirer VS audit-ci

Although I'm happy there is a way to bundle Node.js apps with support for pnpm, and for a modern-ish version of Node.js, it's somewhat slow in my experience to build locally. Interactivity doesn't have the greatest ecosystem there, especially with TypeScript. Best library I've found is Enquirer.

{ "name": "@jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "description": "Recursively omit specified keys from an object", "tags": ["object", "deep", "remove", "omit"], "version": "0.3.0", "author": "Jon Schlinkert (https://github.com/jonschlinkert)", "repository": "jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "bugs": "https://github.com/jonschlinkert/omit-deep/issues", "license": "MIT" }

In case you need to ask for user input, optionally you can use a prompt file. This is very useful to customize the output of the generator. Prompts are defined using a library named Enquirer.

> I don't fully understand why packages like this are so popular.

It actually works like this: Author X develops `iseven`, `isodd`, etc. No one really downloads such packages. Author X then develops `importantPackage` which does do something useful developers out here download. Now `iseven`, `isodd` are downloaded alongside `importantPackage`.

My point is, we should recognize certain NPM authors as toxic, but I guess "freedom of speech/code" stops us from doing so. Example of such an author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/

something like enquirer

You're thinking of Jon Schlinkert, publisher of 1435 packages on npm.

It's insanely funny to me that these packages exist while one of his bigger projects (https://github.com/enquirer/enquirer) lists the following reason under "why use it":

> Lightweight - Only one dependency, the excellent ansi-colors by Brian Woodward.

It's written by this guy, who shits out micro libraries by the hundreds. He moved the project to another user under the pretense that he was learning to program back then, but a lot of his stuff is similarly inconsequential micro libraries.

Enquirer

For those hoping to run npm audit in your CI/CD pipeline, I recommend this tool from IBM: https://github.com/IBM/audit-ci

In highly regulated industries, shipping code flagged as having a vuln without a manual approval could be a liability.

This wrapper around npm takes an allowlist argument, and our procedure is for an engineer to review the failing build, determine if the vulnerability (ugh, usually regex ddos or prototype pollution) is present in code that runs only at build time with trusted inputs, only on the client which is by definition untrusted, or in our webserver which takes in untrusted input.

As long as it's either of the first two, we document it in a commit and comment and redeploy. It's annoying, but it's far better than npm audit forcing a fix.