gulp-sri

SubResource Integrity hashes generator for gulp. Code heavily borrowed from gulp-buster.

What is subresource integrity?

A way to verify the contents of files after they have been delivered to the browser. There is a good blog post here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-introduction-to-javascript-based-ddos/

Install

First off, install gulp.

Then install gulp-sri as a development dependency:

npm install --save-dev gulp-sri

How to use

gulp-sri can be used standalone as part of a build task, or in conjunction with gulp-watch to update the hashes as the files are modified.

Example with gulp-watch ^1.0.5 and gulp-ruby-sass ^0.7.1 (compile, bust and watch for changes):

var gulp = require('gulp'),
	watch = require('gulp-watch'),
	sass = require('gulp-ruby-sass'),
	sri = require('gulp-sri');

gulp.task('default', function() {
	var srcGlob = 'scss/*.scss';
	return gulp.src(srcGlob)
		.pipe(watch(srcGlob, function(files) {
			return files
				.pipe(sass())
				.pipe(gulp.dest('css'))
				.pipe(sri())           // pipe generated files into gulp-sri
				.pipe(gulp.dest('.'));  // output sri.json to project root
	}));
});

Syntax

<through stream> sri([options])

Parameters

• options (object|string, optional): the configuration options object. Passing options as a string is treated as { fileName: options }.

• options.fileName (string, optional): the output filename. Defaults to 'sri.json'.

• options.algorithms (string|function, optional): the hashing algorithms to be used. Defaults to ['sha256']. This option is passed directly to the sri-toolbox.

• options.type (string, optional): Content type string to be included in the output hash. This option is passed directly to the sri-toolbox.

• options.transform (function, optional): allows mutating the hashes object, or even creating a completely new data structure, before passing it to the formatter. It takes a copy of the hashes object (a plain object in the filePath: hash format) as the first argument and must return a value compatible with the formatter option. Defaults to passing through the hashes object.

• options.formatter (function, optional): the function responsible for serializing the hashes data structure into the string content of the output file. It takes the value returned from the transform function as the first argument and must return a string. Defaults to JSON.stringify.

Note: all of the options which accept a function can be run asynchronously by returning a promise (or thenable). If the given option has a return value constraint, the constraint will still be applied to the promise's fulfillment value.

Integrating with Web applications

gulp-sri is language-agnostic, thus this part relies on you and your specific use case. By default, gulp-sri generates a JSON file in the following format:

{
	"path/to/file/relative/to/project/root/filename.ext": "srihash",
	//other entries
}

Integration can be easily achieved on any language which supports JSON parsing, in either back-end or front-end. See the Implementations page for examples and existing solutions for your language of choice.

Note: The output file contents' data structure and format can be customized through the configuration options. This enables gulp-sri to output the cache buster hashes file in a suitable native data structure for your target language, as well as allowing to mutate the paths and hashes to suit your specific needs.

Architecture

When gulp-sri is initialized, it creates an empty object which serves as a cache for the generated hashes. Generated hashes are then grouped by the options.fileName parameter. That means, piping two different streams into sri('foo.json') will merge both of those streams' files' hashes into the same output file. This approach's main pros are:

• Allows piping only modified files into gulp-sri, the other hashes are retrieved from the cache when generating the output file;
• Deleted files' hashes are automatically cleaned on startup, as the hashes cache object starts empty on every startup;
• Although this feature is very similar to gulp-remember, gulp-sri's hashes cache is much more efficient. Using gulp-remember would cause all of the files that have ever went through the stream to be re-hashed whenever piping any new file, unlike gulp-sri's hashes cache which allows hashing only the files that are piped into gulp-buster.

There are close to no cons, the only notable drawback is that all the to-be-hashed files must be piped into gulp-sri (preferably at startup) before it generates the output file with all hashes that you'd expect. A feature to allow inputting an already-generated hashes file was considered in order to avoid having to pipe all the to-be-hashed files at startup, but that seems to bring more cons than pros -- the auto-cleanup of deleted files' hashes would no longer happen, outdated hashes could stay in the output hashes file if the to-be-hashed files were edited while gulp was not running, and finally it'd also be incompatible with the transform and formatter features.