rua
LavaMoat
rua | LavaMoat | |
---|---|---|
4 | 16 | |
420 | 819 | |
- | 1.6% | |
6.7 | 9.8 | |
4 months ago | about 2 hours ago | |
Rust | JavaScript | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
rua
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Node.js packages don't deserve your trust
> While I find projects in those other languages to also have too many dependencies, it's no where near what happens in JS apps. I'm thinking of projects I've recently worked on in Rust, PHP, and Java.
My experience with these new languages is such that this feels a bit unfair. It's like insisting that a disaster with 1000 fatalities is "much worse" than one with "only". It's ... true ... I guess, but there's something uncomfortable about making the comparison. Something has gone badly wrong if the comparison even needs to happen in the first place.
What I'm getting at is that e.g. Rust has an enormous problem in this area. It's not uncommon for me to see Node projects with over a thousand transitive dependencies, but on the other hand, I very frequently see Rust projects with over a hundred. And the Node projects tend to be more complicated than the Rust ones; they do more.
Take the last Rust program I tried to use, tealdeer. [1] If you don't know, tldr is a project that provides alternative simplified man pages for commonly used programs that consist entirely of easy to understand examples for the program. [2] What a tldr client needs to do is simply to check a local cache for each lookup, and if necessary update the cache online. It's a trivial problem that can be, and has been! [3], solved in a few hundred lines of shell (if you're being extremely verbose). How many recursive dependencies would you guess tealdeer uses? Depends on how you count, of course, but as of today the answer is ~133 deduplicated dependencies! For a program that's a glorified wrapper around curl!
Or another Rust program I looked at recently, rua [4]. In Arch Linux, the AUR is a repository of user maintained scripts for building and installing software as native Arch packages. Official tools for the building and installing software already exist for Arch, but it is common for users to use a wrapper around these tools that makes fetching and updating the software from the AUR easier. It's a relatively simple task that (once again) can be done with shell scripts. rua is such a wrapper. As of today it uses 137 deduplicated dependencies!
These Rust programs are simple terminal tools to do tasks that are almost trivial in nature. And yet they require hundreds of constantly updating dependencies! The situation may well be better than what you'll find for Node, but it's undeniably disastrous compared to either simpler languages without a built in package manager (like C) or more complicated batteries-included languages where best practices continue to prevail (like Python).
[1] https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer
[2] https://tldr.sh/
[3] https://github.com/raylee/tldr-sh-client/blob/main/tldr
[4] https://github.com/vn971/rua
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Paru vs Yay vs Other (please specify in comments)
I gotta dig into rua too, seems cool!
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Is there an AUR helper that can automatically apply custom patches?
Rua can do local patches (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helper#Comparison_tables)
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5 reasons why I love coding on Linux
https://github.com/vn971/rua#install-the-aur-way
LavaMoat
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Ledger's NPM account has been hacked
Just yesterday I watched a talk [0] at WarsawJS about LavaMoat [1], a set of tools to protect against malicious behaviour from npm dependencies. Guess itโs time to look into it deeper.
[0]: https://naugtur.pl/pres3/lava/2023end.html
[1]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat
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Dozens of malicious PyPI packages discovered targeting developers
You are basically talking about Lavamoat. It provides tooling and policies for SES, which aims to make it into standards.
https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat
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Supply chain security - prevent, not avoid
Enter: lavamoat. https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat
- LavaMoat: Tools for sandboxing your dependency graph
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Deno.js in Production. Key Takeaways.
You should check out Lavamoat: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat
It attempts to do what you're essentially describing. It was built by the MetaMask team, where supply chain attacks are an obviously huge risk.
I've spent some time trying to get it working in an app, but haven't been able to get it all the way working. It's still pretty beta and not well documented.
- Node.js packages don't deserve your trust
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How to respond to growing supply chain security risks?
And it is happening right now. Github is opening the GitHub Advisory Database to community submissions. Awesome community NodeSecure builds cool things like scanner and js-x-ray. There are also lockfile-lint, LavaMoat, Jfrog-npm-tools (and I am sure there is more).
- On node-ipc and the importance of trusting trust
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NPM package compromised by author: erases files on RU / BY computers on install
There is a proposal to add OCAPs on a language level in TC39[0]. There is already a drop-in implementation which already works in both Nodejs and browsers[1].
As a developer who wants to sandbox your own (recursive) dependencies, this is made accessible today in Lavamoat[2]. Basically a package or app can provide a policy manifest specifying which capabilities (e.g. network or filesystem access) should be granted for each dependency. Also comes with a tool that will auto-generate a starting point from your existing dependency tree.
IMO this is the future. Currently it does come with a performance penalty but hopefully this idea will catch on and make it into runtime implementations.
Lavamoat is still marked as "preprod" on npm but talking to the author it's a matter of days or weeks until the first stable release.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30703817
[1]: https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses
[2]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat
- Node runtime that sandboxes all NPM dependencies by default
What are some alternatives?
yay - Yet another Yogurt - An AUR Helper written in Go
metamask-extension - :globe_with_meridians: :electric_plug: The MetaMask browser extension enables browsing Ethereum blockchain enabled websites
paru - Feature packed AUR helper
create-vue - ๐ ๏ธ The recommended way to start a Vite-powered Vue project
dotter - A dotfile manager and templater written in rust ๐ฆ
vue-cli - ๐ ๏ธ webpack-based tooling for Vue.js Development
alma - Create Arch Linux based bootable USB drives
cli - the package manager for JavaScript
customizepkg - A tool for Arch Linux package manager pacman to modify PKGBUILD automatically
handlebars-helpers - 188 handlebars helpers in ~20 categories. Can be used with Assemble, Ghost, YUI, express.js etc.
arch-audit - A utility like pkg-audit for Arch Linux. Based on Arch Security Team data.
EventSource - a polyfill for http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/