Note: This tool is still in development
A CLI tool that checks your project's npm dependencies and alerts you if any of them define one of the npm lifecycle script that are automatically executed during npm install. Namely preinstall, install, postinstall, preuninstall and postuninstall.
Such scripts are typically no issue and might be required by a package to work properly. However, they can also pose a security threat as outlined here and here. The main danger being that a user is often not aware or fully in control of their execution.
This is a great tool to regularly execute in your CI so you can spot whether a dependency introduced an install script.
To further secure your system from such attacks you should consider having npm ignore all implicit scripts using the configuration command: npm config set ignore-scripts true
Note however that this disables any pre- and post-scripts, such as for example the commonly used pretest script.
There are two modes of operation, "Lockfile Mode" and "package.json Mode".
no-scripts lockfile
This mode will start by fetching the tarballs of all dependencies listed in the project's lockfile from the corresponding npm registry. It then evaluates the package.json files of every package, applying normalization using @npmcli/package-json in order to detect implicit install-scripts such as node-gyp rebuild which would be executed if a package contains a certain file.
no-scripts package-json
This mode operates fully offline and is therefore rather fast. However, since a malicious package that has already been installed could have altered it's own package.json during the postinstall phase, this mode might be fooled into thinking that a package has no scripts even though they were already executed. I have not yet evaluated the feasability of such an attack though.
FAQs
A CLI tool that checks your project's npm dependencies and alerts you if any of them define one of the [npm lifecycle script](https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v10/using-npm/scripts) that are automatically executed during `npm install`. Namely `preinstall`, `ins
The npm package no-scripts receives a total of 0 weekly downloads. As such, no-scripts popularity was classified as not popular.
We found that no-scripts demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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