Read 2026-10-28
apify/crawlee: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in apify/crawlee's code and history at fe60af7: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | adequate |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | strong |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongpackages/basic-crawler/src/internals/basic-crawler.ts is 3,188 lines, 132× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 24 lines. 6 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 3,188. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
packages/basic-crawler/src/internals/basic-crawler.ts:1 — 3,188 lines (132× median) |
packages/basic-crawler/src/internals/throttling-request-manager.ts:1 — 1,214 lines (50× median) |
packages/core/src/storages/request-queue.ts:1 — 1,206 lines (50× median) |
packages/browser-pool/src/browser-pool.ts:1 — 1,164 lines (48× median) |
packages/core/src/storages/key-value-store.ts:1 — 1,065 lines (44× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequate6% of recent commits change more than 2,000 lines
adequate38 of 638 commits in the last 24 months changed over 2,000 lines of code, not counting reformatting, renames, vendored or generated code. A change that size is rarely reviewed line by line. Ask how they were reviewed, and what made them that large.
| 38 commits over 2,000 lines |
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongReleases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v3.18.2, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v3.18.1. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v3.18.2 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate2 credential-shaped strings committed to the tree
adequateMatches for JWT appear in tracked files outside test and fixture paths. They stay in the history even after they leave the tree, so what matters is whether each was rotated. The code cannot tell whether any of them is live, and that decides whether this matters: none sits in production configuration, and none is in a format its provider keeps for live keys. Is any of these live? Show that each was rotated after it was committed, and when.
| 2 cited: JWT pattern matched |
9 Dockerfiles run the application as root
adequateNo USER instruction switches away from root, so the process runs with full privileges inside the container. It is a one-line fix and an ordinary expectation, which is why its absence is worth asking about: it usually says more about whether anyone has reviewed the deployment than about this container specifically.
packages/templates/templates/camoufox-ts/Dockerfile — runs as root |
packages/templates/templates/cheerio-js/Dockerfile — runs as root |
packages/templates/templates/cheerio-ts/Dockerfile — runs as root |
packages/templates/templates/empty-js/Dockerfile — runs as root |
The build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate5 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.
.github/workflows/check-pr-title.yml:12 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/docs.yml:28 — action pinned by tag |
2 shell commands built from strings
adequate2 places run a command through a shell (`shell=True`, `os.system`, `exec` with a template) rather than passing arguments. Where any part comes from outside, it is command injection. Ask where each one's input comes from.
packages/cli/src/commands/create-project-command.ts:191 — command run through a shell |
packages/cli/src/commands/run-project-command.ts:39 — command run through a shell |
33 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities, 13 high or critical in what ships
adequate33 of 2,600 locked dependencies match 97 published advisories in OSV, 45 of them rated high or critical. A lockfile says which version is installed, not whether the flawed code is reachable from this product, so each needs a look. Most are fixed by an upgrade, and the advisory names the version.
pnpm-lock.yaml — dompurify 3.4.16: GHSA-cg2g-xh64-v4q7 (critical), fixed in 3.4.17 |
pnpm-lock.yaml — tinypool 1.1.1: GHSA-5gmw-xhrv-c9v3 (critical), fixed in 2.1.1 |
pnpm-lock.yaml — handlebars 4.7.9: GHSA-8r5x-fm3f-whwj (critical), fixed in 4.7.10; a development dependency |
1 advisory against this project in the last 24 months
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-06-10. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 1 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 3.18.1. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version.
| 2026-06-10: CVE-2026-46497 (low): Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library. From version 1.0.0 to before version 1.7.0, Crawlee is vulnerable to SSRF via sitemap-derived URLs. Th |
Observability & Operations
strongNo finding.
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on apify/crawlee: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
Survey a repository: free on public repositories. Private code is read on your own machine by a collector whose source you can read first.