saltcorn/saltcorn: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 19 lines. 55 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 9,814. 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.

210 places catch an error and do nothing with it, across 138 files (0.5 per thousand lines). Each is a failure the system will not report. They surface later as problems nobody can explain, and they are cheap to fix now.

Of five ordinary markers — CI workflows, CODEOWNERS, a pull-request template, pre-commit hooks, contribution guidance — 1 is present: CI workflows. Branch protection itself is a GitHub setting rather than a file, so this is a reading of proxies and not of the rules themselves. What it does establish is that the process is not written down anywhere a new engineer would find it.

The suite is configured to retry failing tests (deploy/playwright/playwright.config.js). A retry turns a flaky test green without saying why it failed, so a green build means the tests passed eventually. Ask how many retries a typical run needs, and which tests need them.

The code is pinned to Node.js 20 (end of life 2026-04-30). None of these receives security fixes any more; the first stopped on 2026-04-30. Moving off an unsupported runtime is rarely a one-line change, so a buyer should ask whether the upgrade is planned and what it touches.

The newest release, v1.6.2, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v1.6.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.

3 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.

91 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.

Third-party code is committed into this repository without any statement of the terms it arrived under. Unknown terms are harder to deal with than inconvenient ones: an awkward licence can be complied with, an absent one cannot. Each of these needs its origin established before the code changes hands.

The newest was published on 2026-08-06. 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 10 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 1.6.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version.

Nothing 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.

6 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.