improved-yarn-audit

This project aims to improve upon the existing Yarn package manager audit functionality.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/djfdyuruiry/improved-yarn-audit

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Currently yarn audit has several issues making it difficult to use in a CI pipeline:

• No way to ignore advisories
• Unable to filter out low severity issues
• Ongoing network issues with NPM registry cause false positives

improved-yarn-audit provides a wrapper around the yarn audit command which addresses all of the above problems.

Installing

Run:

yarn add improved-yarn-audit

Running an Audit Check

To execute an audit check, run:

yarn run improved-yarn-audit

Setting the Severity Level

You can define a minimum severity level to report, any advisories below this level are ignored.

yarn run improved-yarn-audit --min-severity moderate

Run with --help to see all levels available

Excluding Advisories

Often dev dependencies can become outdated and the package maintainer no longer provides updates. This leads to audit advisories that will never affect your production code.

To remedy this, you can pass a csv list of advisory IDs to ignore.

yarn run improved-yarn-audit --exclude GHSA-f9cm-p3w6-xvr3,GHSA-cph5-m8f7-6c5x,GHSA-gpvr-g6gh-9mc2

.iyarc File

If an .iyarc file is present in the current working directory, it will be parsed and used to specify a list of advisory exclusions.

Advisory exclusions to be ignored can either be provided on their own line, or as a comma separated list.

Example .iyarc file:

# This file can contain comments, you could do something like:
# 34 is ignored because there is no fix available (last checked 20th March 2020)
34

# This one doesn't affect us
GHSA-3fw8-66wf-pr7m

# We can also ignore all these, as a comma separated list
46,53,124
GHSA-f9cm-p3w6-xvr3,GHSA-cph5-m8f7-6c5x,GHSA-gpvr-g6gh-9mc2

Note: if you pass in exclusions using the command line, these will override the .iyarc file

Maintaining Advisory Exclusions

Over time as you bump package versions, exclusions may become redundant as those advisories are no longer present in your dependencies.

If you want to fail the audit check when exclusions are missing from the Yarn audit output use the --fail-on-missing-exclusions flag.

yarn run improved-yarn-audit --fail-on-missing-exclusions

The exit code will be the total number of missing exclusions detected.

Ignore All Dev Advisories

If you want to ignore any advisories from dev dependencies, you can use the --ignore-dev-deps flag to do this.

yarn run improved-yarn-audit --ignore-dev-deps

Retrying Network Issues

As of April 2019 there are outstanding network issues with the NPM registry audit API, which cause frequent request failues. To work around this until a fix is implemented you can pass a flag to retry any failed requests.

yarn run improved-yarn-audit --retry-on-network-failure

NPM Users

If you are an NPM fan looking for a similar solution, checkout the better-npm-audit package.