Ask HN: How are you securing your NPM dependencies?

2 points by madospace 7 days ago | 4 comments

There are few obvious things like adding min-release-age, ignore-scripts and save-exact. What other practice we can follow to ensure we are minimizing the damage, especially with chained dependencies.

benoau 7 days ago |

Freezing the versions in package.json and generally not revisiting unless they have vulnerabilities or there's a compelling reason to update a specific package (which is rare).

madospace 7 days ago | |

Curious to know how are you going to ensure right security patches are getting updated in-time. Most of my troubles are that I have fixed version of packages that are older than a year old. Now I am scared to update anything :)

benoau 7 days ago | | |

I use calendar alerts to run `npm audit`, but the older the code is the less likely you have to worry. You can update dependencies on a similar schedule but you need a solid test suite to make sure nothing broke.

When a vulnerable package there's only a few options, best case scenario you can ignore it if it it isn't relevant to your usage, otherwise I prefer whichever is the smallest action of updating, removing, or mitigating it in place.