npm-lint VS npm

That postinstall and other scripts have been a problem for a long time - the PoC for example could be installed via npx, which would then run postinstall which executes another script to steal /etc/password data.

This is not a new problem, you just have another vector.

I came up with a free linter package to try solve it - but no one seemed interested, and here we are 7 later talking about where people are now offering paid services to mitigate it.

https://github.com/tanepiper/npm-lint

Also ended up writing a similar tool but didn't take it much further.

I did try come up with a npm linter but never really completed it.

A while back I wrote a opt-in tool called npl-lint[1] that would allow some CI-level enforcement of rules in package.json although I didn't go too far with it - one thing was to check the scripts section and allow whitelisted apps, or whitelisted sources for dependencies.

It came about because I ended up having a spat with one of the NPM engineers at the time because they launched npx with the ability to run arbitrary gists[2] and this was before 2FA (FWIW you can still absolutely do this with npx).

I wrote a proof of concept[3] that showed you could, inside a package.json add a command to install another package from a gist location, and then use that to steal credentials, bash history, etc.

[1] https://github.com/tanepiper/npm-lint

The fact that JSON doesn't support comments is so annoying, and I always thought that Douglas Crockford's rationale for this basically made no sense ("They can be misused!" - like, so what, nearly anything can be misused. So without support for comments e.g. in package.json files I have to do even worse hacky workaround bullshit like "__some_field_comment": "this is my comment"). There is of course jsonc and JSON5 but the fact that it's not supported everywhere means 10 years later we still can't write comments in package.json (there is https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 and about a million related issues).

Things like the sparkline charts on npmjs (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm ) are interactive SVGs. I think they're pretty common for data visualizations of all kinds

I actually did a POC 7 years ago about this - https://github.com/tanepiper/steal-ur-stuff

It was reported to npm at the time, but they chose to ignore it - https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17724

Every time this pops up, I'm reminded of the day that the NPM registry started returning 418 responses.

I remember being at a training course that day and my manager asking me what we could do to fix it because our CI was failing to pull dependencies from NPM.

Trying to explain that NPM was returning a status code intended as an April Fools joke and which was never meant to see the light of production was quite difficult

https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20791

I should really get around to how I discovered this 6 years ago and still nothing done about it

Whenever something like this comes up I usually have to tap the sign (and the original report)

NPM is not "Node Package Manager". https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm

> which can be overriden with env setting

Support for this is not great. Lots of packages still don't support this properly. My experience matches the 2015 comment https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/775#issuecomment-71294085

> Not sure why "symlinks" would be involved.

If you make your node_modules a symlink, multiple packages will fail. Even if you're not interested in doing that, others are.

> What NPM does is leaps and bounds ahead

Unless you change your node / gyp version. It doesn't really have a concept of runtime version. You can restrict it, but not have two concurrent versions if they conflict.

[email protected] was released in May 2017 and it seems to address many of the issues that Yarn aims to solve. Do keep an eye on it!

I think it's had been supposed to do that since forever. Apart from some bug in npm 5.3. Are you sure your package-lock versions actually conform to the semver ranges in your package.json?