> File-system Based Routing: If your code resides in ./api/login.js it's exposed at http://<SERVER>/api/login. Inspired by good ol' PHP days.
> Auto Dependency Resolution: If a file does require('underscore'), it is automatically installed and resolved. You can always create your own package.json file to install a specific version of a package.
This sounds like a security nightmare.
EDIT: to be clear, I don't meant he combination of both is a security concern, that each one of them separately is problematic.
I don't think I would use any package that makes this classic mistake in 2019. Web services need to be at least vaguely secure and this destroys all my confidence of that.
I saw your comments fixing it - which is pretty awesome by the way (& I hope you've taken on board the other comments regarding securing it even further).
Due to PHP experience, this would've been something that I ensured was implemented properly from the outset. I know this to be true, because I've dabbled in the very space you're working in now, and it was one of the very first things I ensured: that no file could be served except from direct descendants. (I rethought my project and tossed the code)
For something like this you need to be absolutely sure about security. Have a look at the annals of PHP security issues - and most likely you'll see a lot of similarities that you'll need to make sure you address.
I'm sorry if you read hate in my words: definitely was NOT intended! I have nothing against you as a co-habitor of this wonderful planet! To me, the bug highlights that a few design considerations may have been overlooked.
> This project is brand new, I posted the repo publicly this morning.
Are you implying that you don’t think it’s ready for production use? If so, maybe you should do like a lot of projects, and warn about it loud and clear in the docs. It’s not clear at all that users should expect the type of blatant security problems that were discovered here.
If the bar to posting to HN was "I am finally confident this project is mature", rather than "I can post any link I want and if people thing it's cool, it'll get upvoted", HN would have a hell of a lot less cool shit on the front page on a daily basis.
People are allowed to screw up: it's how we learn. They got comments that pointed out flaws, they fixed them and posted a follow-up regarding that fix, why the hate? This person tried to make something cool, they learned important security lessons, and now have a deeper insight into what they made, and the world it operates in. How is this possibly a bad thing we don't want to have happen on HN?
But after reading the thread following your fix it seemed that the fix wasn't done properly. That, more than the security issue itself, kind of ruined my confidence as well, sorry to say.
Seems like your fix[1] for this is a bit fast. You are already importing `path` in that file. Also, you can do this with just one `path.relative`. Lastly, the url package method you are using is deprecated[2].
A simpler fix might be to canonicalize (i.e. no "..") the public folder path and the requested file path and then ensure the public path is a prefix of the other.
I don't disagree that this doesn't seem necessarily secure and the auto dependency resolution is a bad idea for other reasons in my opinion, but I don't see the security aspect of it.
The moment I can upload files to the application folder that are executed, I can just `require('child_process').spawn("my_evil_stuff", [])`. In particular "my_evil_stuff" could be some npm install command. I don't see how automatically installing the dependencies makes this worse than it already is.
EDIT: While this is a different attack vector than I was envisioning here, jexco has provided a scenario in which there are additional vulnerabilities: Vulnerable dependencies that cannot be managed.
Where is the management of requirements? How do you force LTS versions? Or roll back if a version has a vulnerability? When things are automatic you are unable to stop bad things from happening.
Not that I was going to say this is a good idea in the first place, but rolling back vulnerable dependencies is an excellent point that I hadn't thought of. Thanks!
So the app would need write permissions to its own folder. That's obviously a bad idea in a production deployment. I guess I was thinking that the dependencies would be installed during a privileged one-time "deployment run" so you wouldn't need the permissions after. Maybe I'm giving the thing too much credit.
If security is a concern, this is probably a bad choice; this doesn't seem to be advertised as a bulletproof security solution to anything, rather a utility for small little one-off apps that might need _some_ backend functionality. Once you start adding features like file-uploading, youre obviously gonna want to pick a more robust option
When all other layers are secure, like wearing a bulletproof west inside a bulletproof car inside a bunker that can withstand a nuclear blast. And add to that some security by obscurity, like a bunker in a secret location, only accessed via a tunnel.
That said, if security is top priority you also want to be ready if you get shot from within the car. But more importantly you need to define the most common scenarios and make sure you are protected from all of them. One scenario might be someone shooting you, but another scenario might be food poisoning which would require an additional, different solution.
You know it's always a concern, but context is everything.
> small little one-off apps that might need _some_ backend functionality
The security implications of serving a static website vs. a dynamic application that processes payment and queries the database are two different beasts
Pretty sure student projects should teach you something other than `$ npm install`, no?
When I was a hiring manager and scoped out juniors from bootcamps I had a conversation with some candidates and they would say, "I built user registration and login". When I asked them to talk more about it they said, "well I installed auth0"... Any student project which doesn't teach them how something works is not really teaching anything of value, is it?
Expecting a student to learn how to code at all, not to mention code well, from an academic/bootcamp setting, is an expensive fool's errand for anyone that hires them.
Programming is not academic. It has more in common with plumbing and carpentry and electrician work: you learn only by doing, and you learn how to do it well by doing with critical supervision from a mentor.
The difference between engineering and trade work is that trade work, like the jobs you mention, either follows a plan written by an engineer, or prescriptive standards designed by engineers (and usually certified by governing bodies of engineers). Prescriptive standards allow skipping all the engineering calculations as long as the guidelines are followed and tolerances respected.
Software development (and a lot of hardware development, to be fair) is unique in that doing it well requires functioning as both an engineer and a tradesperson. One's skill has to cover a wide section of the spectrum.
That slight wobble in Earth's orbit we're experiencing, that's Dijkstra rolling in his grave.
All joking aside, programming should be treated a lot more like engineering and a lot less like craft. Yes, it does have aspects of both, but neglecting the engineering aspects of it is proving to be increasingly harmful to our end users.
> a lot more like engineering and a lot less like craft
I think the curve of diminishing returns plays an important role. A near hack job will often get you 90% there, in terms of fulfilling what was exactly requested. I don't think this is true for any other skillset. It's so easy to make something featureful and fragile in software. The time and cost above that can be very difficult to justify to customers/management.
In the words of a previous boss, after I pointed out we need more testing, "Everything is working, we'll fix the bugs as they come".
I disagree somewhat. If the goal of a project is to teach a different skill and it may cause too much of a headache to add a real server this service might make sense. It’s like when you’re learning a new spoken language. It’s better to practice a breadth of situations and vocabularies and make mistakes (that get corrected over time) than to learn fewer things perfectly
If you're ever running this, and you've left it open to a LAN or the internet, your entire system is vulnerable for use in whatever way someone wants. There are bots looking for stuff like this all the time.
I agree with GP. Security is always a concern. I too used to think as long as it's behind the firewall, or a local only exploit, it doesn't matter. But it always matters. Small apps become big apps. Small user bases large ones. Someone gets onto your internal network and then your small userbase app for trusted employees becomes a jumping off point, etc.
Your sort of thinking is how you end up with Yahoo levels of account leaks.
I think your comment about scalability is accurate. Small apps become big apps, and small user bases get bigger. I’ve seen it happen — but I’m not going to think about scaling to thousands of users when I just need a small application to share with my team. If I spent five days building it to the utmost standards, instead of spending one day on something that solves a problem immediately, I’d be laughed at. It is the same with security.
> Your sort of thinking is how you end up with Yahoo levels of account leaks.
I wouldn’t store any of my customers’ data on an insecure internal service! I know that’s mad!
> Security always matters.
The first part of securing a system is to come up with your threat model, isn’t it?
> I wouldn’t store any of my customers’ data on an insecure internal service! I know that’s mad!
I'm completely sure that you're right. You know that would be irresponsible and reckless with lots of very sensitive data.
With that said, how sure can you be of every other person writing a simple, small, business app for just a handful of their coworkers? I've encountered some people doing exactly what you've described without the same level of cool-headed risk-weighing as you.
One of the key functions of GDPR and CCPA and PIPEDA is to make many businesses consider what kind of liability might be attached to things they might otherwise opt to not sweat.
...why? I get that file-system based routing means you know the location of a source file on disk, but if anyone can access that file you've already lost.
And auto-dependency resolution also doesn't seem any larger a security concern, all it's doing is skipping an "npm install" command.
Because if you ever have a broken upload system that allows you to drop a JS file somewhere accessible by the file system routing, you have remote code execution. Additionally, you now have to write guards in every non-endpoint JS file so that it doesn't get executed just by a misplaced HTTP request.
And as for automatic dependency resolution, this means you're not even aware of what transitive dependencies you're pulling in, what version they are and have no way to vet anything - everything is hidden behind a wall of magic.
Make your application directory read-only to the user running the application, as it ought to be anyway.
Automatic dependency resolution however... Fantastic for experimentation, but that's a dealbreaker for production. Maybe it would be OK if it actually wrote the package-lock.json to the application directory, I'd have to think about that.
Probably having .htaccess / .env / database configuration / files that are not supposed to be public be exposed.
For instance, Rails has a public/ folder for files that are going to be served. And jekyll hides files by pattern-matching them[1].
Zero doesn't seem to have exclude folders by default. The solution would be to run Zero is a subfoler and require file in the parent folder which would act as the tree's root.
Currently, files starting with _ (underscore) are hidden in zero. This is still a feature spec we need to finalize as this can create confusion. Maybe a .zeroignore file (as suggested in another comment) would be a better idea.
Why not reverse that and use a whitelist instead. It’s a lot easier to decide what folders and files should be served than to think of all the things that shouldn’t.
Nextjs uses a pages/ subdirectory which gives you implicit routing, without having to compromise on the whitelist aspect. I think it's a better compromise.
There's different levels of 'filesystem access' vulnerabilities.
Some classes of bugs that would be otherwise tame due to the constraints (eg., file upload that might be able to only create new files in some part of the directory tree, or a buggy routine that lets you create arbitrary symlinks, or leftover VCS/CM files that happen to end in .js and are not filtered out by the router) now become the most powerful kind, remote code execution.
My first thought is it doesn't have enough features or too much magic BUT that is EXACTLY why it shines. I'm not going to build the next FAANG company on this but it will let me get a backend up and running VERY quickly to test out an idea. The number of ideas of mine that have been killed in the cradle by decision paralysis is higher than I would like...
Exactly this. One of the aims to start this project was to reduce one more friction when testing an idea. Project configurations and set up is a big time suck.
Thank you for creating this! I often find I had an idea and then spend 1-2 hours doing NOTHING towards the idea trying to future-proof what I'm writing to the max. That is a trait of mine I need to work on by itself but "zero" should help let convince me to "just try it with zero before you setup TypeScript/Angular/Vue/React/Cordova/Express/etc...". I saw your other comment about making it Apache/PHP level easy and as someone who came from that background and when I first saw a query param displayed in the response from the web (ie: localhost?name=Josh -> Hello Josh!) I was hooked (you can imagine my reaction when I learned what a database was ).
In that vein do you think TypeScript is on the horizon for support? It's not a dealbreaker by any means but it would be nice to just write .ts files and have them automatically compiled (transpiled?). I can write JS just fine but TS's types are a nice sanity check for me.
the project's philsophy seems to be "use a bundler that works and don't reinvent it" so I bet adding a TS bundler would be a possibility, that'd be awesome
But, you can install express, copy paste the getting started code and be up and running at a similar level in 5 minutes. I...guess I don't understand why I should trade something super simple and easy to use for this additional level of abstraction magic.
No, you cannot, not in an easy way. I've taught many people Node.js/express and they always struggle with all of those copy/pasted configuration bits. Now if I add them, I tell them something along the lines This is just magic, copy/paste it to make your app work. Some day you will understand.
Once you get used to them it's easy, but to get started it's a nightmare. I started with PHP back in the day, and even though it's hated around here the bar to getting started there is amazingly low in a good way.
I'll echo this. I was hired by Atlassian to join and "make prototyping better". Part of this meant enabling designers to more easily create code based prototypes.
I learned very early on that if creating something in code means learning/entering cryptic code just to start (that is, before any work gets done), then you lose people very quickly. Inexperienced developers can easily express, "Hey if I click this button and a field has the word 'bubblegum', I want a popup to show", and likely can figure out the js necessary for it. But if you say, "Ok, before you write that javascript you have to configure a package.json and install all necessary pages, but also make sure your version of node is the correct version for our internal libs", their excitement to dive into a project is ruined.
It means you are getting frustrated, evaluating your life choices and whether Node.js is really for you. The lesson they get is that Node.js is not for them!
I prefer those who are new to any webdev to get started by creating a simple CRUD, not with the grunt details like parsing a JSON body or what is this session stuff. Those IMHO should be optional optimization details to apply later on if you wish, but not mandatory for everyone.
Depending on what you need, setting up a React app is super complicated and time consuming. Especially when you need SSR.
There is a reason why frameworks such as Next.js, Reframe, and now this one are being used.
I'd actually say the opposite, it's tools like Webpack that don't have enough abstraction. I don't care how source maps are being generated, why on earth is it a good idea for Webpack to force me to dig into that? (If at least Webpack's default source map config would work out of the box but it doesn't.)
Parcel hits the right abstraction level much better.
I wrote a shallow http.createServer abstraction for one of my projects that works directly from the terminal and takes a port number as its only argument. I just copy/paste this every time I need a web server. Its literally like 2 minutes of effort and has no dependencies.
Does this mean we need to update Greenspun's 10th rule "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." to say "Any sufficiently complicated development environment contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of PHP?.
This is exactly what I needed. However with great abstraction comes great responsibility: you are now the gatekeepers of keeping things efficient in the backend. If I write "require('moment')", will you blindly require, or will you require, tree-shake, minify, etc?
I guess my question is: can I trust Zero to always strive for optimum efficiency, or is it just convenience?
I think that's a valid concern. We can certainly optimize and enable tree-shaking (zero uses Parcel to bundle React and HTML). The idea is to implement common optimizations so users don't have to. But also to provide enough escape hatches so advanced users can 'eject' and fine-tune themselves.
Yes please do, I just have a pet peeve against npm modules requiring mb's of files to only use a couple functions. Knowing that Zero does tree-shaking and general optimizations for me will make me happily use for most of my projects!
Zero configuration... read "We made choices for you, just trust us. Read our documentation to see what your missing. Oh, also since you didn't configure it we'll change (the defaults) on our next release".
> Oh, also since you didn't configure it we'll change (the defaults) on our next release
That doesn't really matter, since I'll only use the next release for my next release, and the previous prototype has either been thrown away or turned into a proper stack.
I wonder if this what the people who made the things I have to inherit and patch and secure believed.
Current app is EOL Framework Release in an EOL Language Release running on an EOL Distro Release on an unmonitored server without any patches applied... so business as usual.
This is nothing to do with node. This is poor programmer decision making. You can build great node apps with a real minimalist approach. Holding up projects which pull in half of npm as "the world of node" is like holding up a hot and ready 5$ pizza and saying all Italian food is bad.
Most other ecosystems inlcude more batteries (e.g. PHP). That is why you have to update this ecosystems with all their modules.
The problem is, if the core has a bug, ALL apps in this ecosystem has the bugs.
node includes not everything and concentrate on the core. If modules have bugs, not all apps a compromised.
It is a fundamental design decision, if you not like it, don't use node.
You can include all dependencies manually and update them manually, nobody keeps you away. But have fun to update all your deps.
Encouraged by who? I see the same people which used to install jQuery or WordPress plugins and were able to get janky but working sites. But prolific module authors and node core contributors don't promote these approaches.
Maybe if you listen too much to twitter "thought leaders" you might get this impression, but we are all aware of the problems with social media platforms...
Well, considering the amount of dependencies in popular projects like CRA that was highlighted here a few days ago I don't think it's unreasonable to extrapolate to the general ecosystem. Of course there are module authors and devs doing it differently, but in general most node projects I see are more dependency-happy than projects I see in other languages.
Give people a useful tool (npm) and they will muck it up. This is both the best and worst part of the general node ecosystem. The issue is people saying things like "that's just node". It is not node, it is the ease of use and popularity meaning there will be more of these examples. If you care to make high quality use of the platform and tools you can, but that means not following the crowd.
Wow, I love that people can wrap express and many of its components and end with something so different from its foundation. That being said, this level of "batteries included" approach has a cost.
In this example, it is the complexity of this file[1] and the fact that if you were to write this as a single express middleware you could probably write it in less than 20 lines.
Yes, writting an express backend is really simple, some plugins, error-handling etc. and you can run it in less than 1 hour.
But the Frontend with webpack needs definitely more time, hours and hours to fiddle webpack to your needs.
This project has a definded strucutre and support defined modules (react), so it could save you a lot of webpack config time, but you can not do everything with it. You have to use it as it is.
Setting up Webpack isn't even the time-consuming part, in my experience - it's getting the back-end and front-end to work together and having a comfortable development environment in which both live reload.
People in this thread are way overly negative. I understand this tool as something to be used for prototyping and locally-only but everyone is jumping on how insecure it is or how it's got a bunch of dependencies, or it's just express, etc. None of that matters if you aren't exposing this to the internet. This is a really neat project that lets you play with something right away and a lot of you all are bashing the author for things not even in the scope of the project.
Lastly this has so many upvotes and is #1 on the front page because it's cool, fun, and perfect for a little prototype or POC. There are a number of positive comments buried at the bottom but the highest comment is about how this is a "Security Nightmare".
Edit: Typo and I wanted to add: Not everything posted on HN has to be battle-tested, scalable, parallelizable, profitable, cloud-ready, secure, etc. It's the kind of attitude in this thread that keeps people from posting their own work at all. No one want's to get torn apart, back off and provide constructive criticism or keep quiet. (Note: advice I have not always practiced in the past)
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I agree with you about the over-negativity, but I have to disagree about the value of the "security nightmare" comments. Nowhere on the marketing page (that I saw) does it say, "prototype/development use only!" In fact I got the opposite impression. It seems to want to be a new framework. It's critically important to surface security issues early and often.
There's already a cultural anti-pattern in the js world of just `npm install`ing stuff and shipping to prod without auditing well (I've heard a number of times, "well it has like 60 stars on github").
If the project marketed itself as a "development only" or non-production framework then I'd agree with you 100%. However as it stands it's dangerous and could lead to extreme compromise of a system if it gets deployed to a production environment.
That said security-minded people are often inconsiderate and horribly untactful in their approach. That needs to change. You don't need to be overly negative to point out a security issue. Something like, "Cool start, but might want to point out that it's not meant for production!" would be a lot better IMHO.
> That said security-minded people are often inconsiderate and horribly untactful in their approach. That needs to change. You don't need to be overly negative to point out a security issue. Something like, "Cool start, but might want to point out that it's not meant for production!" would be a lot better IMHO.
Agreed, and I also agree that maybe it should have a tagline about "not production ready" or even "never production ready". Not sure what the end goals of Zero are. I will say I thought it was pretty evident that this was not for production (if only to the sheer amount of "magic" inside) but maybe that's just me and it should have a disclaimer to that effect.
Maybe security people are getting tired of inconsiderate developers that keep shipping bazillions of insecure packages all over mission critical applications.
Devs need to change their culture. This behavior is actively harming end-users through repeated data breaches.
Partly yes. They certainly have a professional responsibility to write applications that resist well known attacks, such as directory traversal, xss, sqli, etc.
This isn't new, and not knowing how to deal with it is like a builder not knowing how to safely stand up a wall.
> Agreed, and I also agree that maybe it should have a tagline about "not production ready" or even "never production ready".
That's a great idea! It should definitely be implemented.
With that said, what do you make of the point that things that are clearly not suitable for production (and sometimes labeled accordingly) have a nasty habit of making their way into production anyway? Do you think it has salience here? You're clearly a thoughtful person with your hear in the right place, so I'd very much like to hear your opinion.
Again, your point is both completely valid and absolutely correct. Purpose and labeling should be clear enough that no person could possibly miss them.
> With that said, what do you make of the point that things that are clearly not suitable for production (and sometimes labeled accordingly) have a nasty habit of making their way into production anyway? Do you think it has salience here? You're clearly a thoughtful person with your hear in the right place, so I'd very much like to hear your opinion.
I don't think I have a good answer. I'm currently serving a little over 6 million requests a month for a service I never advertised yet some non-zero number of developers copied code from stack overflow or wrote based on my github project to hit an endpoint that was just a demo. Since it was un-authenticated and I didn't notice the traffic until much later I have no good way to shut this down without pulling the rug out from under people. Eventually I will have to but since it's not costing my anything extra really I've left it.
Now I put a warning on it when I noticed the traffic but that was 3 years and 2 million requests less per month ago so...
I guess yes, we, as developers, should be better about putting warnings and the like on our projects but by the same (if not greater) token, people using existing code/services bear the responsibility to vet things they use. I don't know how to fix people to vet stuff better. Hell, I don't know how to make myself do that. That said you take risks every day, you risk your live when you get behind the wheel, you risk security holes when you don't vet code you use or build upon. I've weighed the risks of driving against the rewards and found the risk acceptable. For a lot of software I use I've made the same decision. I just don't have the time and energy to vet everything for myself and timelines and other pressures at work make it equally impossible there.
At what point do you say "Ehh, it's secure enough below this point"?
* npm library with 1000's of dependencies?
* npm library with no dependencies
* npm
* nodejs
* OS
* Hardware
I honestly don't know a consistent/standardized way to handle it.
As you so correctly and wisely point out, we take all kinds of risks every day. It's an inherent part of life. Yet we also generally accept that things that can be done in a safer way should be when reasonably possible.
At this point I'm leaning towards deprecating the idea that encouragement, positivity, and documentation will lead to developers making good decisions. As you've demonstrated, it's clearly insufficient, and I suspect your experience is an outlier but far from unique.
Increasingly, I think we may have to consider measures to get it right the first time. And we have to be sure our peers do too, because we're all living in the same environment and context. Otherwise, sooner or later, someone who didn't read a warning label is going to try to build a PII-handling business on Zero Server (or similar) and it's going to be a dumpster fire.
I would love a world where friendly encouragement, niceness, and documentation could scaleably do this. Sadly, it's perhaps possible that that world and this one could be slightly different.
Some might imagine it as eschewing heedless amateurism in favor of mature professionalism.
One starting point might be re-examining if all the negativity shown in reaction to Zero Server is actually excessive. Some of it surely is! It's also perhaps possible that some of it could be viewed as the horrified reactions of professionals who care about quality (and think about downstream effects) coming face-to-face with reckless engineering.
> Some might imagine it as eschewing heedless amateurism in favor of mature professionalism.
I don't fully understand what you're advocating, so I apologize if I am misinterpreting or mischaracterizing your position. But I can't imagine "mature professionalism" including berating or embarrassing another developer for creating a security hole. Some people do need that, but most don't. Many devs I've worked with are horrified when they find out they wrote in a vulnerability, and they try to grow and find out better ways. This is startup culture tho.
When I worked in enterprise type environments it was the opposite. There, you could send the dev a working exploit and most of them would groan and bitch about how "you security guys just want to tear things down and break things." I can understand being more of a dick in those situations, but I would still contend that's a venting of frustration more than a desire to actually teach. Most people just get defensive and put up walls when they feel attacked or embarrassed, and the learning is over at that point.
Berating someone is never helpful. Setting out to embarrass someone is never helpful. The goal should never be to blame someone. The goal should always to educate someone on what has happened, what exploits have been enabled, and how this could cause harm.
One issue is that full-throated encouragement coupled with suggestions of problems couched in uncertainty is the Dale Carnegie approach. I suspect you're using it now! It's well-suited to a great many situations, as documented in the man's seminal work.
Unfortunately, this suitability is not universal. It is fallible, and in security those failure can be quite dangerous. The Carnegie approach thus described makes it very easy for devs to notice the encouragement and ignore the suggestions of criticism. I have personally encountered this reaction in both open source and enterprise-y contexts, generally from developers who might be charitably described as highly enthusiastic. Including right here on HN!
I've also encountered the hostility you described in reaction to kind, generous, compassionate security reports of the sort you suggest. This has happened in open source, startup-type, and enterprise-y environments.
The key to what I'm advocating is this: you are not your code and the other person is not their code. Who wrote a vulnerability is not as important as that it exists. How it can be fixed, and how it can be prevented in the future, are what matter.
Professionalism means understanding the distinction between a craftsperson and what they have produced. It also means understanding the distinction between yourself and your work. It means understanding that ignorance isn't a character flaw, it's a temporary state of affairs that can be fixed.
It also means realizing that some who refuses to participate in fixing their technical ignorance is someone who is being unprofessional. Such a person might benefit from correction.
Ok, I think I understand your position better, and if so I agree.
> The Carnegie approach thus described makes it very easy for devs to notice the encouragement and ignore the suggestions of criticism.
This is definitely true, I've seen it too. Definitely something to watch out for.
I guess at the end of the day I think it comes down to "know your audience." Similar to the Principle of Least Privilege I like to follow (what I call) the Principle of Least Criticism. Don't use any more criticism than what is necessary, but (and I suspect this is where we will both agree) you need to use enough criticism that the person understands your point.
That's a wonderful idea! It's an ideal way to engage with people.
With that said there might be some significant limitations on the approach. The principle one is that it relies on knowing the individuals involved fairly well. This is easy in a close-knit and small startup environment! It could perhaps be more difficult in a sizable enterprise or open source context where you don't know the other party, don't have time to build a relationship, and/or can't rely on a long conversation to slowly build up to the least amount of criticism required. There's also the question of how to handle groups or meetings in which different people have different thresholds. When one person's minimum required might be someone else's excessive negativity and they're both in the room, there might not be a winning outcome with this approach.
Knowing your audience is an excellent and wise maxim to live by. It might not always be as simple to live by as could be hoped.
> That said security-minded people are often inconsiderate and horribly untactful in their approach. That needs to change. You don't need to be overly negative to point out a security issue. Something like, "Cool start, but might want to point out that it's not meant for production!" would be a lot better IMHO.
That's a wonderful idea! I'm absolutely certain that people will invariably respond quickly and reasonably to kind, compassionate, considerately made points. Especially ones that are very cautious to cough anything that might be taken as negative as a potential or a possibility.
For my own part, I've found this practice to be both exhausting to implement and highly unreliable in deployment. I'm absolutely certain that these just reflect my own failures. I'm similarly sure that you've seen infinitely better results!
After all, everyone knows that casually documenting something to the tune of "This code might not be as safe for production as it could be" will yield a reasonable level of caution in all developers.
My initial reaction was, "that's fair" but then on more thought I don't think I agree. Firstly the npm package currently up is version 1.0.7, which doesn't imply "protoype/development/unstable/etc."
I've also been part of many open source projects and it's very common to not release/announce it until we've proven it ourselves in production.
So while I think one should definitely exercise caution with brand spanking new code, there's no way to know whether it was just ideated recently or has been in development for a while but just got released/opened for the first time.
Thank you! We only recently started working on this and ofcourse it’s not perfect.
All those concerns are very valid and will be addressed one-by-one. The project is open source under a decent license, I am VERY willing to accept any security PRs.
I agree people tend to be overly negative on HN about projects like this, but the AFAICT the project does not state any caveats about the security and/or where it should or shouldn't be used.
I think any user should be responsible for vetting their tech choices. Why would the author put a disclaimer instead of fixing the issues?
In this case, the project is clearly too new/unstable/insecure to use in any real sense. It's presence as #1 on HN says more about the audience than the project itself I think.
We can talk in generalities but since in this case we have more specifics let's go that route.
This is an open-sourcing of, presumably, an internal tool used at CodeInterview. It's "shiny marketing site" feels very cookie-cutter to me and I'd be shocked if that wasn't either a template or a very few handful of components from something like bootstrap/similar. And it was posted to "Show HN", which is important given the rules of Show HN [1].
The website gives the impression of a polished product. It doesn’t come across as a POC. Therefore I think the security concerns are valid. Someone is bound to build something with this, get users and get hacked otherwise.
My God, the people on this thread. There are people out there, working as software "engineers," who think that if they can't personally find a vuln in 5 seconds, the system must be secure. How is this #1 on the site right now?
That's pretty cool to quickly put together a POC app. There should be an "eject" command that would export everything to a "real" Node application, with package.json and so on, so that the POC can be converted to a real app easily.
As others have said before, I think this is amazing for small one offs and maybe for beginning programmers. I'm afraid that, like all frameworks, people will start to misuse it eventually. Someone will make a little app with that, because it's so fast, simple and amazing, right? Later, however, the app will grow and it will become a maintainability nightmare. The only good thing about it is that you can easily get out of this framework and migrate to managing express/node/react yourself, or so it seems. It isn't like rails, where if you get into it, your app is so highly coupled to it that any escaping is impossible, even if your app becomes very complex.
Escaping and writing a custom node+express+React SSR server for a zero-based app should be easy. But zero isn't a 'platform' anyway. It's just an abstraction on common config and some glue code, all open-source so you can easily fork and improve.
Who is this for? Is the goal to enable people who don't know what they're doing at all to make applications?
Maybe at a glance that is a laudable goal, but surely there is a point where, if you need so much handholding, you should consider either sitting down and learning what you need or making someone else is build it for you.
Newbies? I guess that is possible, but I personally think that actually learning to use your tools and the libraries that are available should be the goal. Handing the control of everything to some 3rd party component is eventually going to leave the beginner with issues they have no way of solving because they've never had to learn anything.
There's a lot of value in removing all the plumbing you typically find at the start of node project to handle basic things like routing. I'm a big fan of moving all that "outside" the app
This might seem silly if all you're use to is working on some startup's big app with a dozen other people, but for small orgs that need to run small programs for a long time it's a mess to maintain that stuff over the long term and to count on lone coders in small engagements to get right.
> Handing the control of everything to some 3rd party component
In the cases I describe, this ^^ is a great idea. Keeps maintenance of the common stuff in a common place. Everyone freaked out in this thread about there being a way to get at files outside the project root. Well the author fixed that in one place and now it's fixed for everyone. How many times does an error like that come up and go undetected and uncorrected when even an experienced node coder has to copy pasta so much stock plumbing for the 1000th time to spin up a small service for a small org?
Prototyping, hobbyists, people who host a site about cats and don't need 1000 extra lbs of server side weight. Spinning up a simple API to learn a new client side library. Anywhere that tooling and configuration is getting in the way of someone learning something new. Seems perfect for some uses.
I think this is really nice for when I want to hack together a quick front-end for something. Once I have a working React/Node.js set up I can really quickly build something, but what usually stops me is the dozens of packages and things I need to wire together before I can actually start building something.
`create-react-app` is also pretty good, but this seems to do a bit more. I really like the simplicity of the set up and the fact that you can also just whip up an API call or something.
Every php framework got away from that for really good mesure, including not having your logic in the server document root.
IMHO unless you are building a http daemon, "your logic" should probably not include routing http requests. Using directory tree, url rewriting or generally leaving the controller part of your logic to the underlying httpd is probably fine in most php projects. Note: php frameworks can't do microservices
server is down (yay for proof of scalability ;)) so i can't tell for sure, but it looks like it's derived/based on next.js and comes from the same authors
this is impressive! I would absolutely reach for this first when scraping something together quickly. I'd be super interested in seeing numbers for just how far this can scale before falling over.
Not to sound adversarial, but configuring a web framework tends to be one of the last difficult or time consuming parts of building a web app or backend in my experience.
If you need SPA then yea it's easy. But when you need SSR it becomes a whole different story.
Now imagine you want parts of your app to be SPA and some other parts of your app to be SSR. This becomes super complex. Frameworks like Reframe allow you to do that. (I'm Reframe's author (https://github.com/reframejs/reframe).)
Admittedly, mixing SPA and SSR views in one app is uncommon today but that's because people are not aware that they can do that. This will change.
This is very cool framework and I will certainly use it for small to medium sized apps or website. However, just going through the doc there doesn’t seems to be a way to split components since any file is assumed to be a page. Any way around that?
Lastly, it’s a shame that the doc link points to github. The doc, as layed out in github is a perfect use case for zero.
It seems to me that you should have a folder (www?) that is served by zero, and a folder (lib?) that isn't. Then files in the www folder can import from the lib folder.
Is there any way to "ignore" specific files or directories? For example, I want to reuse React components across different routes (exposed as jsx files). However, I don't want `mysite.com/components/Container` to be a valid endpoint.
Yes. It's not written in docs yet but any file or folder starting with _ (underscore) is not exposed publicly. This feature spec is still open for discussion as on how to tackle it the best.
seems like doing something like Next.js might be a better choice, aka have a main folder that exposes publicly accessible files, instead of having to add _ to each folders that should be private (it seems to me most folder/files would be private and not the other way around)
Check my reply to this comment. The underscore idea was one of the first things to come to mind too, but I think having a specific file makes it clear to others who might not understand Zero internals.
Having Markdown rendered as HTML is basically all I want when I'm standing up a single web page or a small website. This is definitely something I'll bookmark for later.
While I embrace less configuration, you can't really avoid TLS these days. There is always configuration, many of configurations. Some implicit, some explicit.
As others have pointed out, make sure to mark files that are not supposed to be exposed to the client by prefixing them with a underscore, otherwise you'll have a bit of a security issue. Otherwise, you're good to go.
> Auto Dependency Resolution: If a file does require('underscore'), it is automatically installed and resolved. You can always create your own package.json file to install a specific version of a package.
This sounds like a security nightmare.
EDIT: to be clear, I don't meant he combination of both is a security concern, that each one of them separately is problematic.