npm-audit | npm Docs (2023)

Synopsis

npm audit [fix|signatures]

Description

The audit command submits a description of the dependencies configured inyour project to your default registry and asks for a report of knownvulnerabilities. If any vulnerabilities are found, then the impact andappropriate remediation will be calculated. If the fix argument isprovided, then remediations will be applied to the package tree.

The command will exit with a 0 exit code if no vulnerabilities were found.

Note that some vulnerabilities cannot be fixed automatically and willrequire manual intervention or review. Also note that since npm auditfix runs a full-fledged npm install under the hood, all configs thatapply to the installer will also apply to npm install -- so things likenpm audit fix --package-lock-only will work as expected.

By default, the audit command will exit with a non-zero code if anyvulnerability is found. It may be useful in CI environments to include the--audit-level parameter to specify the minimum vulnerability level thatwill cause the command to fail. This option does not filter the reportoutput, it simply changes the command's failure threshold.

Audit Signatures

To ensure the integrity of packages you download from the public npm registry, or any registry that supports signatures, you can verify the registry signatures of downloaded packages using the npm CLI.

Registry signatures can be verified using the following audit command:

$ npm audit signatures

The npm CLI supports registry signatures and signing keys provided by any registry if the following conventions are followed:

Signatures are provided in the package's packument in each published version within the dist object:

"dist":{
 "..omitted..": "..omitted..",
 "signatures": [{
 "keyid": "SHA256:{{SHA256_PUBLIC_KEY}}",
 "sig": "a312b9c3cb4a1b693e8ebac5ee1ca9cc01f2661c14391917dcb111517f72370809..."
 }]
}

See this example of a signed package from the public npm registry.

The sig is generated using the following template: ${package.name}@${package.version}:${package.dist.integrity} and the keyid has to match one of the public signing keys below.

Public signing keys are provided at registry-host.tld/-/npm/v1/keys in the following format:

{
 "keys": [{
 "expires": null,
 "keyid": "SHA256:{{SHA256_PUBLIC_KEY}}",
 "keytype": "ecdsa-sha2-nistp256",
See Also
17 Best Vulnerability Assessment Scanning ToolsHow You Should Treat NPM Audit ResultsRead Jit Blog Post: The Developer's Guide to Using NPM Audit to Create a Dependency Tree | Jit.ioWhat is npm audit fix???
 "scheme": "ecdsa-sha2-nistp256",
 "key": "{{B64_PUBLIC_KEY}}"
 }]
}

Keys response:

expires: null or a simplified extended ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ
keydid: sha256 fingerprint of the public key
keytype: only ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 is currently supported by the npm CLI
scheme: only ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 is currently supported by the npm CLI
key: base64 encoded public key

See this example key's response from the public npm registry.

Audit Endpoints

There are two audit endpoints that npm may use to fetch vulnerabilityinformation: the Bulk Advisory endpoint and the Quick Audit endpoint.

Bulk Advisory Endpoint

As of version 7, npm uses the much faster Bulk Advisory endpoint tooptimize the speed of calculating audit results.

npm will generate a JSON payload with the name and list of versions of eachpackage in the tree, and POST it to the default configured registry atthe path /-/npm/v1/security/advisories/bulk.

Any packages in the tree that do not have a version field in theirpackage.json file will be ignored. If any --omit options are specified(either via the --omit config, or one of theshorthands such as --production, --only=dev, and so on), then packages willbe omitted from the submitted payload as appropriate.

If the registry responds with an error, or with an invalid response, thennpm will attempt to load advisory data from the Quick Audit endpoint.

The expected result will contain a set of advisory objects for eachdependency that matches the advisory range. Each advisory object containsa name, url, id, severity, vulnerable_versions, and title.

npm then uses these advisory objects to calculate vulnerabilities andmeta-vulnerabilities of the dependencies within the tree.

Quick Audit Endpoint

If the Bulk Advisory endpoint returns an error, or invalid data, npm willattempt to load advisory data from the Quick Audit endpoint, which isconsiderably slower in most cases.

The full package tree as found in package-lock.json is submitted, alongwith the following pieces of additional metadata:

npm_version
node_version
platform
arch
node_env

All packages in the tree are submitted to the Quick Audit endpoint.Omitted dependency types are skipped when generating the report.

Scrubbing

Out of an abundance of caution, npm versions 5 and 6 would "scrub" anypackages from the submitted report if their name contained a / character,so as to avoid leaking the names of potentially private packages or gitURLs.

However, in practice, this resulted in audits often failing to properlydetect meta-vulnerabilities, because the tree would appear to be invaliddue to missing dependencies, and prevented the detection of vulnerabilitiesin package trees that used git dependencies or private modules.

This scrubbing has been removed from npm as of version 7.

Calculating Meta-Vulnerabilities and Remediations

npm uses the@npmcli/metavuln-calculatormodule to turn a set of security advisories into a set of "vulnerability"objects. A "meta-vulnerability" is a dependency that is vulnerable byvirtue of dependence on vulnerable versions of a vulnerable package.

For example, if the package foo is vulnerable in the range >=1.0.2<2.0.0, and the package bar depends on foo@^1.1.0, then that versionof bar can only be installed by installing a vulnerable version of foo.In this case, bar is a "metavulnerability".

Once metavulnerabilities for a given package are calculated, they arecached in the ~/.npm folder and only re-evaluated if the advisory rangechanges, or a new version of the package is published (in which case, thenew version is checked for metavulnerable status as well).

If the chain of metavulnerabilities extends all the way to the rootproject, and it cannot be updated without changing its dependency ranges,then npm audit fix will require the --force option to apply theremediation. If remediations do not require changes to the dependencyranges, then all vulnerable packages will be updated to a version that doesnot have an advisory or metavulnerability posted against it.

Exit Code

The npm audit command will exit with a 0 exit code if no vulnerabilitieswere found. The npm audit fix command will exit with 0 exit code if novulnerabilities are found or if the remediation is able to successfullyfix all vulnerabilities.

If vulnerabilities were found the exit code will depend on theaudit-level config.

Examples

Scan your project for vulnerabilities and automatically install any compatibleupdates to vulnerable dependencies:

$ npm audit fix

Run audit fix without modifying node_modules, but still updating thepkglock:

$ npm audit fix --package-lock-only

Skip updating devDependencies:

$ npm audit fix --only=prod

Have audit fix install SemVer-major updates to toplevel dependencies, notjust SemVer-compatible ones:

$ npm audit fix --force

Do a dry run to get an idea of what audit fix will do, and also outputinstall information in JSON format:

$ npm audit fix --dry-run --json

Scan your project for vulnerabilities and just show the details, withoutfixing anything:

$ npm audit

Get the detailed audit report in JSON format:

$ npm audit --json

Fail an audit only if the results include a vulnerability with a level of moderate or higher:

$ npm audit --audit-level=moderate

Configuration

`audit-level`

Default: null
Type: null, "info", "low", "moderate", "high", "critical", or "none"

The minimum level of vulnerability for npm audit to exit with a non-zeroexit code.

`dry-run`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Indicates that you don't want npm to make any changes and that it shouldonly report what it would have done. This can be passed into any of thecommands that modify your local installation, eg, install, update,dedupe, uninstall, as well as pack and publish.

Note: This is NOT honored by other network related commands, eg dist-tags,owner, etc.

`force`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Removes various protections against unfortunate side effects, commonmistakes, unnecessary performance degradation, and malicious input.

Allow clobbering non-npm files in global installs.
Allow the npm version command to work on an unclean git repository.
Allow deleting the cache folder with npm cache clean.
Allow installing packages that have an engines declaration requiring adifferent version of npm.
Allow installing packages that have an engines declaration requiring adifferent version of node, even if --engine-strict is enabled.
Allow npm audit fix to install modules outside your stated dependencyrange (including SemVer-major changes).
Allow unpublishing all versions of a published package.
Allow conflicting peerDependencies to be installed in the root project.
Implicitly set --yes during npm init.
Allow clobbering existing values in npm pkg
Allow unpublishing of entire packages (not just a single version).

If you don't have a clear idea of what you want to do, it is stronglyrecommended that you do not use this option!

`json`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Whether or not to output JSON data, rather than the normal output.

In npm pkg set it enables parsing set values with JSON.parse() beforesaving them to your package.json.

Not supported by all npm commands.

`package-lock-only`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

If set to true, the current operation will only use the package-lock.json,ignoring node_modules.

For update this means only the package-lock.json will be updated,instead of checking node_modules and downloading dependencies.

For list this means the output will be based on the tree described by thepackage-lock.json, rather than the contents of node_modules.

`omit`

Default: 'dev' if the NODE_ENV environment variable is set to'production', otherwise empty.
Type: "dev", "optional", or "peer" (can be set multiple times)

Dependency types to omit from the installation tree on disk.

Note that these dependencies are still resolved and added to thepackage-lock.json or npm-shrinkwrap.json file. They are just notphysically installed on disk.

If a package type appears in both the --include and --omit lists, thenit will be included.

If the resulting omit list includes 'dev', then the NODE_ENV environmentvariable will be set to 'production' for all lifecycle scripts.

`foreground-scripts`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Run all build scripts (ie, preinstall, install, and postinstall)scripts for installed packages in the foreground process, sharing standardinput, output, and error with the main npm process.

Note that this will generally make installs run slower, and be much noisier,but can be useful for debugging.

`ignore-scripts`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

If true, npm does not run scripts specified in package.json files.

Note that commands explicitly intended to run a particular script, such asnpm start, npm stop, npm restart, npm test, and npm run-scriptwill still run their intended script if ignore-scripts is set, but theywill not run any pre- or post-scripts.

`workspace`

Default:
Type: String (can be set multiple times)

Enable running a command in the context of the configured workspaces of thecurrent project while filtering by running only the workspaces defined bythis configuration option.

Valid values for the workspace config are either:

Workspace names
Path to a workspace directory
Path to a parent workspace directory (will result in selecting allworkspaces within that folder)

When set for the npm init command, this may be set to the folder of aworkspace which does not yet exist, to create the folder and set it up as abrand new workspace within the project.

This value is not exported to the environment for child processes.

`workspaces`

Default: null
Type: null or Boolean

Set to true to run the command in the context of all configuredworkspaces.

Explicitly setting this to false will cause commands like install toignore workspaces altogether. When not set explicitly:

Commands that operate on the node_modules tree (install, update, etc.)will link workspaces into the node_modules folder. - Commands that doother things (test, exec, publish, etc.) will operate on the root project,unless one or more workspaces are specified in the workspace config.

This value is not exported to the environment for child processes.

`include-workspace-root`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Include the workspace root when workspaces are enabled for a command.

When false, specifying individual workspaces via the workspace config, orall workspaces via the workspaces flag, will cause npm to operate only onthe specified workspaces, and not on the root project.

This value is not exported to the environment for child processes.

`install-links`

Default: false
Type: Boolean

When set file: protocol dependencies will be packed and installed as regulardependencies instead of creating a symlink. This option has no effect onworkspaces.