Read 2026-10-28
frappe/hrms: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in frappe/hrms's code and history at ba8442a: 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 | adequate |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | adequate |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
.gitmodules:1: 1 submodule(s) this survey does not read: frappe-ui
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
stronghrms/payroll/doctype/salary_slip/salary_slip.py is 2,860 lines, 105× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 27 lines. 5 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 2,860. 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.
hrms/payroll/doctype/salary_slip/salary_slip.py:1 — 2,860 lines (105× median) |
hrms/payroll/doctype/payroll_entry/payroll_entry.py:1 — 2,004 lines (74× median) |
hrms/hr/doctype/leave_application/leave_application.py:1 — 1,592 lines (58× median) |
hrms/hr/utils.py:1 — 1,086 lines (40× median) |
hrms/hr/doctype/expense_claim/expense_claim.py:1 — 1,046 lines (38× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequatePinned dependencies have not moved in 19 months
adequateThe lockfile last changed 578 days before the newest commit, and 3,114 commits have landed since. Every security fix published upstream in that time is absent until someone updates it, and the longer the gap the larger and riskier that update becomes.
| frontend/yarn.lock last changed 2025-03-28 |
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate8% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 2808 fixes in the last 24 months, 229 touched a test. A fix without the test that would have caught the bug can quietly come back, and the suite never learns from what went wrong.
| 229 of 2808 |
Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v16.52.0, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v16.0.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v16.52.0 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequateThe build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate8 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/assets.yml:10 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/build_image.yml:28 — action pinned by tag |
75 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities, 92 high or critical
adequate75 of 937 locked dependencies match 182 published advisories in OSV, 92 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. This lockfile pins development tools alongside what ships and does not say which is which, so some of these may never reach a user.
frontend/yarn.lock — @babel/traverse 7.21.5: GHSA-67hx-6x53-jw92 (critical), fixed in 7.23.2 |
frontend/yarn.lock — @babel/plugin-transform-modules-systemjs 7.20.11: GHSA-fv7c-fp4j-7gwp (high), fixed in 7.29.4 |
frontend/yarn.lock — @grpc/grpc-js 1.9.14: GHSA-5375-pq7m-f5r2 (high), fixed in 1.9.16 |
4 places insert HTML from a variable without sanitising it
adequate4 places set HTML from a value that is neither a literal nor passed through a sanitiser. Where the value can come from a user, that is stored cross-site scripting, and it is the first thing a buyer's security review looks for in a frontend.
frontend/src/views/Notifications.vue:73 — HTML from a variable |
roster/src/components/MonthViewTable.vue:109 — HTML from a variable |
roster/src/components/ShiftAssignmentDialog.vue:117 — HTML from a variable |
The production build publishes source maps
adequateThe build configuration emits source maps for production, so the original source, with its comments and structure, is downloadable by every visitor. Upload them to an error tracker and keep them off the public server instead.
frontend/vite.config.js:75 — source maps in a production build |
15 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 3 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-10-26. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. The record is incomplete: NVD: 34 records name hrms with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2011-0853, CVE-2011-0854, CVE-2011-0857, …).
| 2026-10-26: GHSA-rh2j-fcxx-r67m (moderate), fixed in 16.20.1: Unauthorised modification of records due to missing validation |
| 2026-10-26: GHSA-m8m7-r43p-2jjf (moderate), fixed in 16.20.1: Unauthorised modification of records due to missing validation |
| 2026-10-26: GHSA-26gj-rr4j-3hgc (low), fixed in 16.20.1: Usage data sent without checking the telemetry setting |
| 2026-10-26: GHSA-hphm-4mc5-m7gj (low), fixed in 16.20.1: Exposure of subscription key in request URL |
| 2026-10-26: GHSA-v72r-rg45-x9rh (low), fixed in 16.20.1: Unauthorised access to company details due to missing validation |
Observability & Operations
adequateNo telemetry or error reporting is wired in anywhere
adequateNone of 1,541 readable files references an instrumentation, metrics or error-reporting library. If this system is in production, nobody learns that it broke from the system itself — they learn it from a customer. That is a reliability finding before it is an observability one.
| searched 1,541 tracked text files for 16 known instrumentation libraries; manifests for metrics, tracing and error-reporting families; locked dependencies for the packages that emit; 0 matched |
No structured logging library is in use
adequateNothing references a structured logging library. Logs that are written to be read by a person are not searchable by a machine, which means incident response here is proportional to how well someone remembers the codebase rather than to what the tooling can find.
| searched 1,541 files for 10 structured logging libraries; 0 matched |
No error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.
| no error reporter initialised |
1 of 3 deployed images carry no version, or `latest`
adequate1 images in the deployment configuration are named without a version or as `latest`. A redeploy can change the software without a commit, a rollback has nothing to roll back to, and nobody can say from the repository what is running.
docker/docker-compose.yml:19 — image without a version |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on frappe/hrms: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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