A new endpoint on npm to fetch metadata in bulk - to help for checks related to supply chain attacks

[gsouf]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

NPM already has an endpoint to check for security audits in bulk: /-/npm/v1/security/advisories/bulk.

I'd like to propose something similar but for package metadata, specifically publish timestamps.

Context

Package managers like pnpm have a minimumReleaseAge setting that prevents installing packages published too recently. It's a supply-chain security measure, if a package gets compromised, you have a time buffer before your CI picks it up.

The problem is that this check currently only happens at resolution time. Once a version is in the lockfile, later installs skip the check entirely. There's an open PR on pnpm to fix this by re-validating the lockfile before install: pnpm/pnpm#11583

The fix works, but it has a performance cost: to revalidate, you need to fetch metadata for every package in the lockfile individually. In a large project with hundreds of dependencies, that's countless of HTTP requests on every CI run.

Proposal

A bulk endpoint, something like /-/npm/v1/packages/metadata/bulk, where you POST a list of (name, version) pairs and get back the publish timestamps (and potentially other metadata) in a single response.

Something along these lines:

POST /-/npm/v1/packages/metadata/bulk

{
  "packages": {
    "lodash": ["4.17.21"],
    "express": ["4.18.2", "4.19.0"]
  },
  "fields": ["time"]
}

{
  "lodash": {
    "4.17.21": { "time": "2021-02-20T15:42:15.077Z" }
  },
  "express": {
    "4.18.2": { "time": "2023-10-12T..." },
    "4.19.0": { "time": "2024-03-25T..." }
  }
}

Why it matters

Right now the choice is between security (revalidate everything, pay the network cost) and speed (trust the lockfile, skip the check).

A bulk endpoint would make revalidation more efficient in terms of network overhead: one request instead of hundreds. This benefits not just pnpm but any package manager or tool that wants to verify publish timestamps post-resolution.

I'm not deeply familiar with the registry internals so I might be missing some constraints, but from what I know, it looks like this would make a big difference. Happy to hear if there are better approaches to solve the same problem.

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[gsouf]

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