June 4th is a historic date. Not only is it our very own Liran Tal’s birthday (Mazal Tov, Liran!) but it is also the date that the millionth package was indexed into the npm registry. npm is a package manager for JavaScript packages. The core component of npm is its public registry, hosting JavaScript packages that can be accessed by the npm client to build JavaScript applications.

If you’re a user of npm and are interested in how you can use it more securely, be sure to read our npm security cheatsheet, listing ten top best practices on how to use npm safely.

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A brief history of npm, including security incidents

January 2010: npm was created by Isaac Z. Schlueter, written in JavaScript.

npm was created by Isaac Z. Schlueter, written in JavaScript. March 2016: popular JavaScript package, left-pad, was unpublished from the npm repository due to a naming dispute. After much disruption among the JavaScript world, tightened up its unpublishing policy.

popular JavaScript package, left-pad, was unpublished from the npm repository due to a naming dispute. After much disruption among the JavaScript world, tightened up its unpublishing policy. July 2018: a malicious version of the eslint-scope package was released which exposed npm credentials of users to the attacker.

a malicious version of the eslint-scope package was released which exposed npm credentials of users to the attacker. November 2018: the malicious package, flatmap-stream, was released to npm which was added as a dependency to the popular event-stream package. The package targeted Copay the bitcoin wallet.

the malicious package, flatmap-stream, was released to npm which was added as a dependency to the popular event-stream package. The package targeted Copay the bitcoin wallet. June 4th 2019: npm indexes its one-millionth package.

npm’s top ten packages

The npm website lists its top ten most popular packages. These are as listed below, with vulnerability information included. Interestingly, the request package has seen 17 typosquatting attempts.

Package Vulnerabilities lodash 3 vulnerabilities (1 high sev) request 1 vulnerability (17 typosquatting attempts) chalk 0 vulnerabilities (1 typosquatting attempt) react 2 vulnerabilities (1 high sev) express 1 vulnerability commander 0 vulnerabilities moment 3 vulnerabilities debug 1 vulnerability async 0 vulnerabilities prop-types 0 vulnerabilities

If we consider popularity as the number of total downloads we can see which libraries are used heavily both as direct and indirect dependencies:

Package Downloads debug >40 million weekly downloads kind-of >34 million weekly downloads supports-color >34 million weekly downloads readable-stream >31 million weekly downloads source-map >30 million weekly downloads yargs >27 million weekly downloads camelcase >26 million weekly downloads minimist >25 million weekly downloads strip-ansi >25 million weekly downloads chalk >25 million weekly downloads

Out of the above 10 packages, only debug was found to contain a security vulnerability.

npm by numbers

The sheer scale of the popularity and growth of npm is staggering as we can see from this graph, showing the number of indexed packages over just the last couple of years. In fact, we see a 250% growth of the platform in just over 2 years, since January 2017.

Even month-by-month the growth of npm usage is visible, as we can see from the number of packages that are downloaded each month in 2019.

Here are some more npm stats:

1 million indexed packages (+ those that have been indexed since this post was written!)

indexed packages (+ those that have been indexed since this post was written!) 10.9 billion downloads last week

downloads last week 46.9 billion downloads last month

downloads last month The top package is debug and accounts for more than 40 million weekly downloads

and accounts for more than weekly downloads The 1000th most downloaded package is merge-stream and accounts for about 3.5 million downloads a week

most downloaded package is merge-stream and accounts for about downloads a week 250k packages added to npm in 2018

packages added to npm in 2018 110k packages added to npm in 2019, so far

packages added to npm in 2019, so far 144k downloads of the Snyk CLI npm package each week!

downloads of the Snyk CLI npm package each week! 41 packages are owned by Snyk, yay!

GitHub user, dominykas, and a friend from NearForm, provided some stats in a GitHub issue as part of some work being done in the Node.js Foundation’s Package Maintenance working group. Their data shows how general package maintenance varies significantly between authors.

Percentile Last commit Last publish 10% 4 days old 11 days old 20% 5 days old 37 days old 30% 19 days old 88 days old 40% 57 days old 157 days old 50% 119 days old 246 days old 60% 194 days old 369 days old 70% 328 days old 559 days old 80% 563 days old 777 days old 90% 887 days old 1098 days old 95% 1194 days old 1372 days old 100% 2201 days old 2792 days old

Summary

We’d like to send our congratulations to npm for running and maintaining the largest open source language repository, and to the great maintainers and developers in the community who power the ecosystem and assisted in reaching this great achievement. It’s extremely important to make sure that when you use open source packages, you use versions that do not contain known vulnerabilities. It’s straightforward to test your applications for free against the industry-leading Snyk vulnerability database. Try it now, and see the scan results instantly.

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