Note: OSS Gadget is currently in public preview and is not ready for production use.
OSS Gadget is a collection of tools that can help analyze open source projects. These are intended to make it simple to perform low-level tasks, like locating the source code of a given package, downloading it, performing basic analyses on it, or estimating its health. The tools included in OSS Gadget will grow over time; currently, they include:
- oss-characteristic: Identify a package's notable characteristics and features. Uses Application Inspector.
- oss-defog: Searches a package for obfuscated strings (Base-64).
- oss-detect-backdoor: Identifies potential backdoors and malicious code within a package. Currently has a high false-positive rate.
- oss-download: Downloads a package and extracts it locally.
- oss-find-source: Attempts to locate the source code (on GitHub, currently) of a given package.
- oss-health: Calculates health metrics for a given package.
All OSS Gadget tools accept one or more Package URLs as a way to uniquely
identify a package. Package URLs look like pkg:npm/express or pkg:gem/[email protected]. If you leave the
version number off, it implicitly means, "attempt to find the latest version". Using an asterisk
(pkg:npm/express@*) means "perform the action on all available versions".
OSS Gadget supports packages provided by these sources:
- Cargo -
pkg:cargo/... - Cocoapods -
pkg:cocoapods/... - Composer -
pkg:composer/... - CPAN -
pkg:cpan/... - CRAN -
pkg:cran/... - GitHub -
pkg:github/... - Hackage -
pkg:hackage/... - Maven -
pkg:maven/... - NPM -
pkg:npm/... - NuGet -
pkg:nuget/... - RubyGems -
pkg:gem/... - PyPI -
pkg:pypi/...
We shall continue expanding this list to cover additional package management systems and would be happy to accept contributions from the community.
All OSS Gadget tools are command line programs. When installed globally, they can be accessed from your path. For example, to download the NPM left-pad module, type:
$ oss-download pkg:npm/left-pad
This will download left-pad into a newly-created directory named [email protected].
Each of the programs contains information on command line options (--help).
OSS Characteristics is a very thin wrapper on top of Application Inspector. It analyzes a package and gives details on the major characteristics.
OSS Defog examines a package's contents for obfuscated text -- specifically, text that is either Base-64- or Hex-encoded. Most packages do not contain such content, and even the ones that do are usually safe. However, obfuscation has been used to hide malicious code in open source projects.
OSS Download provides a shortcut to download a package. This can be useful in a few different scenarios:
- You are operating across multiple package management ecosystems.
- You don't have (or want) native tools installed, like NPM or Python/PIP.
- You need to download many packages, and therefore cannot use a web-browser.
OSS Download takes a Package URL and calls a module specific to the package manager. For example, if an NPM package is requested, code will run to query the NPM registry for the project, searching for the correct binary. Once found, it downloads it, and by default, extracts it into a new directory.
It's often useful to locate the source code to a given package. OSS Find Source works by searching through package metadata (obtained by querying an API or scraping relevant web pages) for GitHub URLs. It then outputs that list of URLs.
Currently, OSS Find Source is only aware of GitHub. Support for Bitbucket, GitLab, and other sources may be added in the future.
As the name suggests, OSS Health estimates the health of an open source package. It does this by collecting various metrics from a project (currently only supported for GitHub), combining them through an algorithm that we think is reasonable, and displaying the output.
In this context, we mean "health" to mean, roughly, the likelihood that a package will continue to meet stakeholder expectations in the future. We can divide this into different areas:
- Will the project continue to address bugs?
- Will there be new/improved features?
- How vibrant is the community?
- What is the so-called "bus factor"?
- Are security issues addressed promptly?
We recognize that the algorithm implemented isn't perfect, and welcome dialogue and contributions on how to improve it.
OSS Gadget was built and tested using .NET Core 3.1, and will generally target the latest version of .NET Core.
To build OSS Gadget, simply clone the project and run dotnet build from the src directory.
PS D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src> dotnet build
Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 16.4.0+e901037fe for .NET Core
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Restore completed in 50.64 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\Shared\Shared.csproj.
Restore completed in 50.61 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-health\oss-health.csproj.
Restore completed in 50.65 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-download\oss-download.csproj.
Restore completed in 51.71 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-defog\oss-defog.csproj.
Restore completed in 50.64 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-find-source\oss-find-source.csproj.
Restore completed in 50.65 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-characteristics\oss-characteristic.csproj.
Restore completed in 50.66 ms for D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-detect-backdoor\oss-detect-backdoor.csproj.
Shared -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\Shared\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\Shared.dll
oss-find-source -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-find-source\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-find-source.dll
oss-download -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-download\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-download.dll
oss-characteristic -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-characteristics\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-characteristic.dll
oss-health -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-health\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-health.dll
oss-defog -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-defog\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-defog.dll
oss-detect-backdoor -> D:\OSSGadget-GitHub\src\oss-detect-backdoor\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\oss-detect-backdoor.dll
Build succeeded.
0 Warning(s)
0 Error(s)
Time Elapsed 00:00:06.62
You can also use any of the normal dotnet parameters to target a specific framework, configuration, and runtime.
Certain packages must be encoded when described as a Package URL. For more information see Character encoding in the Package URL specification.
If you're using an alternate endpoint, such as a corporate NPM mirror, you can set certain environment variables to redirect traffic to that location instead of the default one. These environment variables include:
GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN: When connecting to GitHub, this environment variable must be defined.CARGO_ENDPOINT: Connect to Cargo (Rust), default value is https://crates.io.CARGO_ENDPOINT_STATIC: Connect to Cargo (Rust), default value is https://static.crates.io.COCOAPODS_SPECS_ENDPOINT: Connect to Cocoapods (MacOS / iOS), default value is https://github.com/Cocoapods/Specs/tree/master.COCOAPODS_SPECS_RAW_ENDPOINT: Connect to Cocoapods (MacOS / iOS), default value is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CocoaPods/Specs/master.COCOAPODS_METADATA_ENDPOINT: Connect to Cocoapods (MacOS / iOS), default value is https://cocoapods.org.COMPOSER_ENDPOINT: Connect to Composer (PHP), default value is https://repo.packagist.org.CPAN_ENDPOINT: Connect to CPAN (Perl), default value is https://metacpan.org.CPAN_BINARY_ENDPOINT: Connect to CPAN (Perl), default value is https://cpan.metacpan.org.CRAN_ENDPOINT: Connect to CRAN (R), default value is https://cran.r-project.org.RUBYGEMS_ENDPOINT: Connect to RubyGems (Ruby), default value is https://rubygems.org.RUBYGEMS_ENDPOINT_API: Connect to RubyGems (Ruby), default value is https://api.rubygems.org.HACKAGE_ENDPOINT: Connect to Hackage (Haskell), default value is https://hackage.haskell.org.MAVEN_ENDPOINT: Connect to Maven (Java), default value is https://repo1.maven.org/maven2.NPM_ENDPOINT: Connect to NPM (JavaScript), default value is https://registry.npmjs.org.NUGET_ENDPOINT_API: Connect to NuGet (.NET), default value is https://api.nuget.org.PYPI_ENDPOINT: Connect to PyPI (Python), default value is https://pypi.org.
Please note that for some systems, like Cocoapods, if you change one value, you'll very likely need to change the others.
To report a security vulnerability, please see SECURITY.md.
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.
When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.