The audit command submits a description of the dependencies configured in your project to your default registry and asks for a report of known vulnerabilities. If any vulnerabilities are found, then the impact and appropriate remediation will be calculated. If the \fBfix\fR argument is provided, then remediations will be applied to the package tree.
Note that some vulnerabilities cannot be fixed automatically and will require manual intervention or review. Also note that since \fBnpm audit
fix\fR runs a full-fledged \fBnpm install\fR under the hood, all configs that apply to the installer will also apply to \fBnpm install\fR -- so things like \fBnpm audit fix --package-lock-only\fR will work as expected.
By default, the audit command will exit with a non-zero code if any vulnerability is found. It may be useful in CI environments to include the \fB--audit-level\fR parameter to specify the minimum vulnerability level that will cause the command to fail. This option does not filter the report output, it simply changes the command's failure threshold.
By default npm requires a package-lock or shrinkwrap in order to run the audit. You can bypass the package lock with \fB--no-package-lock\fR but be aware the results may be different with every run, since npm will re-build the dependency tree each time.
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.
The \fBaudit signatures\fR command will also verify the provenance attestations of downloaded packages. Because provenance attestations are such a new feature, security features may be added to (or changed in) the attestation format over time. To ensure that you're always able to verify attestation signatures check that you're running the latest version of the npm CLI. Please note this often means updating npm beyond the version that ships with Node.js.
The \fBsig\fR is generated using the following template: \fB${package.name}@${package.version}:${package.dist.integrity}\fR and the \fBkeyid\fR has to match one of the public signing keys below.
There are two audit endpoints that npm may use to fetch vulnerability information: the \fBBulk Advisory\fR endpoint and the \fBQuick Audit\fR endpoint.
npm will generate a JSON payload with the name and list of versions of each package in the tree, and POST it to the default configured registry at the path \fB/-/npm/v1/security/advisories/bulk\fR.
Any packages in the tree that do not have a \fBversion\fR field in their package.json file will be ignored. If any \fB--omit\fR options are specified (either via the \fB\fB--omit\fR config\fR\fI\(la/using-npm/config#omit\(ra\fR, or one of the shorthands such as \fB--production\fR, \fB--only=dev\fR, and so on), then packages will be omitted from the submitted payload as appropriate.
The expected result will contain a set of advisory objects for each dependency that matches the advisory range. Each advisory object contains a \fBname\fR, \fBurl\fR, \fBid\fR, \fBseverity\fR, \fBvulnerable_versions\fR, and \fBtitle\fR.
If the \fBBulk Advisory\fR endpoint returns an error, or invalid data, npm will attempt to load advisory data from the \fBQuick Audit\fR endpoint, which is considerably slower in most cases.
All packages in the tree are submitted to the Quick Audit endpoint. Omitted dependency types are skipped when generating the report.
.SS"Scrubbing"
.P
Out of an abundance of caution, npm versions 5 and 6 would "scrub" any packages from the submitted report if their name contained a \fB/\fR character, so as to avoid leaking the names of potentially private packages or git URLs.
.P
However, in practice, this resulted in audits often failing to properly detect meta-vulnerabilities, because the tree would appear to be invalid due to missing dependencies, and prevented the detection of vulnerabilities in package trees that used git dependencies or private modules.
.P
This scrubbing has been removed from npm as of version 7.
.SS"Calculating Meta-Vulnerabilities and Remediations"
.P
npm uses the \fB\fB@npmcli/metavuln-calculator\fR\fR\fI\(lahttp://npm.im/@npmcli/metavuln-calculator\(ra\fR module to turn a set of security advisories into a set of "vulnerability" objects. A "meta-vulnerability" is a dependency that is vulnerable by virtue of dependence on vulnerable versions of a vulnerable package.
.P
For example, if the package \fBfoo\fR is vulnerable in the range \fB>=1.0.2
<2.0.0\fR, and the package \fBbar\fR depends on \fBfoo@^1.1.0\fR, then that version of \fBbar\fR can only be installed by installing a vulnerable version of \fBfoo\fR. In this case, \fBbar\fR is a "metavulnerability".
.P
Once metavulnerabilities for a given package are calculated, they are cached in the \fB~/.npm\fR folder and only re-evaluated if the advisory range changes, or a new version of the package is published (in which case, the new version is checked for metavulnerable status as well).
.P
If the chain of metavulnerabilities extends all the way to the root project, and it cannot be updated without changing its dependency ranges, then \fBnpm audit fix\fR will require the \fB--force\fR option to apply the remediation. If remediations do not require changes to the dependency ranges, then all vulnerable packages will be updated to a version that does not have an advisory or metavulnerability posted against it.
.SS"Exit Code"
.P
The \fBnpm audit\fR command will exit with a 0 exit code if no vulnerabilities were found. The \fBnpm audit fix\fR command will exit with 0 exit code if no vulnerabilities are found \fIor\fR if the remediation is able to successfully fix all vulnerabilities.
.P
If vulnerabilities were found the exit code will depend on the \fB\fBaudit-level\fR config\fR\fI\(la/using-npm/config#audit-level\(ra\fR.
.SS"Examples"
.P
Scan your project for vulnerabilities and automatically install any compatible updates to vulnerable dependencies:
Indicates that you don't want npm to make any changes and that it should only report what it would have done. This can be passed into any of the commands that modify your local installation, eg, \fBinstall\fR, \fBupdate\fR, \fBdedupe\fR, \fBuninstall\fR, as well as \fBpack\fR and \fBpublish\fR.
Allow clobbering non-npm files in global installs.
.IP\(bu4
Allow the \fBnpm version\fR command to work on an unclean git repository.
.IP\(bu4
Allow deleting the cache folder with \fBnpm cache clean\fR.
.IP\(bu4
Allow installing packages that have an \fBengines\fR declaration requiring a different version of npm.
.IP\(bu4
Allow installing packages that have an \fBengines\fR declaration requiring a different version of \fBnode\fR, even if \fB--engine-strict\fR is enabled.
.IP\(bu4
Allow \fBnpm audit fix\fR to install modules outside your stated dependency range (including SemVer-major changes).
.IP\(bu4
Allow unpublishing all versions of a published package.
.IP\(bu4
Allow conflicting peerDependencies to be installed in the root project.
.IP\(bu4
Implicitly set \fB--yes\fR during \fBnpm init\fR.
.IP\(bu4
Allow clobbering existing values in \fBnpm pkg\fR
.IP\(bu4
Allow unpublishing of entire packages (not just a single version).
For \fBlist\fR this means the output will be based on the tree described by the \fBpackage-lock.json\fR, rather than the contents of \fBnode_modules\fR.
If set to false, then ignore \fBpackage-lock.json\fR files when installing. This will also prevent \fIwriting\fR\fBpackage-lock.json\fR if \fBsave\fR is true.
Note that these dependencies \fIare\fR still resolved and added to the \fBpackage-lock.json\fR or \fBnpm-shrinkwrap.json\fR file. They are just not physically installed on disk.
If the resulting omit list includes \fB'dev'\fR, then the \fBNODE_ENV\fR environment variable will be set to \fB'production'\fR for all lifecycle scripts.
Run all build scripts (ie, \fBpreinstall\fR, \fBinstall\fR, and \fBpostinstall\fR) scripts for installed packages in the foreground process, sharing standard input, output, and error with the main npm process.
Note that commands explicitly intended to run a particular script, such as \fBnpm start\fR, \fBnpm stop\fR, \fBnpm restart\fR, \fBnpm test\fR, and \fBnpm run-script\fR will still run their intended script if \fBignore-scripts\fR is set, but they will \fInot\fR run any pre- or post-scripts.
Enable running a command in the context of the configured workspaces of the current project while filtering by running only the workspaces defined by this configuration option.
When set for the \fBnpm init\fR command, this may be set to the folder of a workspace which does not yet exist, to create the folder and set it up as a brand new workspace within the project.
Commands that operate on the \fBnode_modules\fR tree (install, update, etc.) will link workspaces into the \fBnode_modules\fR folder. - Commands that do other things (test, exec, publish, etc.) will operate on the root project, \fIunless\fR one or more workspaces are specified in the \fBworkspace\fR config.
When false, specifying individual workspaces via the \fBworkspace\fR config, or all workspaces via the \fBworkspaces\fR flag, will cause npm to operate only on the specified workspaces, and not on the root project.
When set file: protocol dependencies will be packed and installed as regular dependencies instead of creating a symlink. This option has no effect on workspaces.
