Skip to content

Getting started

Jump to bottom
n1474335 edited this page Mar 28, 2022 · 17 revisions

Installing

CyberChef uses the Grunt build system, so it's very easy to install. You'll need to carry out the following steps to get going:

  1. Install Git
  2. Install version 17 of Node.js and version 8 of its package manager, npm
  3. Install Grunt: npm install -g grunt-cli
  4. git clone https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef.git
  5. cd CyberChef
  6. npm install

npm will then install all the dependencies needed by Grunt.

Consider adding export NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=2048 to your ~/.bashrc file. If you attempt to build a production version of CyberChef, you may get a "JavaScript heap out of memory" error if you do not set this environment variable.

Compiling

Note that CyberChef only supports bash-based dev environments, so primarily Linux and Mac. You may be able to get a build working on Windows, but it is not officially supported.

Grunt has been configured with several tasks to aid in the development process:

grunt dev

Use this when developing new functionality. It will launch a web server on port 8080 hosting an uncompressed, development version of CyberChef, accessible by browsing to localhost:8080. Whenever a source file is modified, the development version will be rebuilt automatically.

grunt prod

When you are ready to create a production build, run this command. It will lint, test, compile and compress all the source files and create a production-ready build in build/prod/.

grunt node

This will package up CyberChef as a NodeJS library. More info on this can be found here: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/wiki/Node-API

npm test

This will run all the pre-configured tests and output the results to stdout.

Repository structure

  • build/
    • prod/ - This folder contains the most recently built production version of CyberChef including the inline version. It is populated by running grunt prod.
  • src/
    • core/ - Core CyberChef files that make up the heart of the application
      • config/ - Files specifying the operation configurations
        • modules/ - Automatically generated module references
      • lib/ - Libraries containing shared code for multiple operations
      • errors/ - Custom error types
      • operations/ - Operation objects
      • vendor/ - Libraries that cannot currently be imported through npm
    • node/ - Wrappers for the NodeJS version of CyberChef
    • web/ - The code which makes up the CyberChef web app
      • css/
        • lib/ - Library CSS and Less files
        • structure/ - Structural styles to lay out the stage
        • themes/ - Look and feel styles
      • html/
        • index.html - The CyberChef page structure
      • static/ - Static files like images
  • test/
    • tests/ - Configuration for tests on operations and recipes
  • .babelrc - Babel transpilation configuration
  • .editorconfig - Text editor conventions stored in a cross-compatible format
  • .travis.yml - Travis CI build process configuration
  • Gruntfile.js - Grunt build process configuration
  • webpack.config.js - Webpack configuration
  • postcss.config.js - PostCSS configuration
  • LICENSE - The Apache 2.0 licence information
  • package.json - npm configuration and a list of all the dependencies
  • README.md - An introduction to CyberChef

Clone this wiki locally