Jenkins Pipeline Step: Outdated NPM Modules

As I mentioned previously at HP, we make heavy use of Node.JS, and Jenkins for our build pipelines. We are also a security business, so any steps we can take to secure our code, we take - previously I covered Checking for Vulnerable Modules, but now I'm going to simply do some checking for outdated modules in our package.json instead.

Prerequisites

This can all be achieved relatively easily in Jenkins by again making use of the Compiler Warnings plug in, so make sure you have this installed in Jenkins before we start.

You will also need to have the npm-check-updates module installed on your build server, easily done with npm install -g npm-check-updates.

Setting Up the plug in

First things first, we need to configure the compiler warnings plug in. Basically, all this plug in does is scan your build log and attempts to match on a given RegEx. To configure the plug in, head over to your Jenkins Configuration page and scroll down to the Compiler Warnings section.

You want to create a new type of warning here with the following information:

• Name: Outdated Modules
• Link Name: Outdated Modules
• Trend Report Name: Outdated NPM Modules

The next bit you will need is the Regular Expression, brace your eyes here for a foul bit of regex! This is the result of much fine tuning to get to the point we don't have any false positives from other lines in the console.

([\w+-]+)\s+(\bv?(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)
(?:-[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?(?:\+[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?\b)\s+(\bv?
(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)(?:-[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?
(?:\+[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?\b)\s+(\bv?(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)\.
(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)(?:-[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?(?:\+[\da-z\-]+(?:\.[\da-z\-]+)*)?\b)\s+(.*)

And finally the mapping script is the part that takes the result from your RegEx and creates a hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning object which Jenkins can recognize. Set it like this:

import hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning

String msg = "Outdated module found: '" + matcher.group(1) + 
"', version '" + matcher.group(2) + "', available: '" + matcher.group(4) + "'"

return new Warning('package.json', 0, "Outdated Module", 'OUTD1', msg); 

The priority here, as it is omitted from the instantiation of the Warning defaults to normal.

Example Log Message, to save you some time, here is an example output from the module:

Package                    Current   Wanted   Latest  Location  
essis-core                   1.0.0  1.0.185  1.0.185  essis-core  
essis-infrastructure-http    0.1.0   0.1.82   0.1.82  essis-infrastructure-http  
hp-logging                   0.1.0   0.1.74   0.1.74  hp-logging  
hp-orm                       0.1.0   0.1.17   0.1.17  hp-orm  
zbac                         1.0.0  1.0.210  1.0.210  zbac  

With all those bits in, your page should look like this:

Adding a Build Step

You will need to add a build step now that executes the npm-check-updates package we installed earlier. This is quite simple, go into jenkins and add a new Shell build step, and in it just add nsp-check-updates --depth=0.

Post-Build Action

The next step is to add a post build action to the project, the screenshot below shows a configuration that will report on the number of outdated modules found.

The important settings here are:

• Parser: Outdated Modules
• And the tick box in Compute New Warnings

That's It

At this point, if you run your job (and there are any detected out of date modules) you will see this in your build log:

09:24:30  => npm outdated --depth=0  
09:24:38 Package  Current  Wanted  Latest  Location  
09:24:38 async      1.3.0   1.3.0   1.4.0  async  
09:24:38 hapi       6.7.1   6.7.1   8.8.0  hapi  
09:24:38 joi        6.5.0   6.5.0   6.6.1  joi  

And your build will go red.

You will also get a nice little graph of your outdated modules over time:

And also, on the build page, you can view the report:

I hope this article was of use. If you have any questions, just ask.CodeProject