Read 2026-10-04
iv-org/invidious: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in iv-org/invidious's code and history at c882300: 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 | strong |
| Observability & Operations | adequate |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
LICENSE: Relicensed: MIT → AGPL-3.0 (2018-01-28).github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md:3: states a policy on AI-generated contributions.gitmodules:1: 1 submodule(s) this survey does not read: mocks
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongsrc/invidious/yt_backend/extractors.cr is 1,219 lines, 14× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 82 lines. 1 file exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,219. 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.
src/invidious/yt_backend/extractors.cr:1 — 1,219 lines (14× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequateTests cover a thin slice of the codebase
adequate15 test files against 182 source files (8.2%). This does not measure whether the tests are good, only whether enough of them exist for the codebase to be changed safely by someone who did not write it — which is exactly the situation after an acquisition.
| 15 test files / 182 source files |
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequateEffort is shifting from building to rewriting
adequateDeleted lines per line added rose from 0.49 to 0.77 between the first and second halves of this history. Rework is normal and often healthy, but a rising ratio means an increasing share of the team's time is spent replacing code that already exists rather than building what does not. Whether that is deliberate repayment or churn is a question for the team.
| first half 0.49, second half 0.77 (split 2022-04-20) |
4% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 81 fixes in the last 24 months, 3 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.
| 3 of 81 |
Security & Reliability Posture
strongThe build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate7 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/auto-close-duplicate.yaml:10 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/build-nightly-container.yml:45 — action pinned by tag |
Relicensed: MIT → AGPL-3.0 (2018-01-28)
adequateThe root licence changed 1 time(s). The latest terms restrict what users, hosts or a buyer may do in ways the earlier ones did not. Code taken under the old terms stays under them, so both matter in diligence.
2 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 1 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-06-30. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. None of them affects the surveyed version.
| 2026-06-30: CVE-2026-58447 (high): Invidious through 2.20260626.0, fixed in commit 77ad416, contains a broken object level authorization vulnerability that allows authenticated attackers to delet |
| 2026-06-29: CVE-2026-57946 (moderate): Invidious before version 2.20260626.0 contains a broken access control vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to retrieve private playlist contents |
Observability & Operations
adequateNo telemetry or error reporting is wired in anywhere
adequateNone of 283 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 283 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 |
One request cannot be followed through the logs
adequateNothing in the service carries a request or correlation id, and there is no tracing. When a customer reports a failure, the log lines that belong to their request cannot be picked out from everyone else's.
| no request id, correlation id or tracing found |
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 |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on iv-org/invidious: 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.