breakcheck

Your dependencies will break. Your CI will leak. Probably not today — but the day the platform removes the API you depend on, or the tag you pinned to gets moved, is the day you find out.

breakcheck scans a project for things that will break or leak before they do: deprecated dependencies, end-of-life runtimes, unpinned CI actions, over-broad workflow permissions, unpinned Docker bases, and APIs that platforms have already removed. Zero dependencies, plain Node.js, no network, no telemetry.

Why

• Platforms remove things with short notice. Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT. Python removed imp and distutils in 3.12. A vendor can halve a shutdown notice and your migration plan breaks with it.
• A workflow pinned to @v4 trusts that the tag still points where it did yesterday. Tags move. Commit SHAs don't.
• permissions: write-all plus a compromised action is how one repo becomes a supply-chain incident. (A recent wave hijacked ~1,900 GitHub accounts and reached ~30,000 repos — most of the damage ran through over-privileged automation, not zero-days.)
• Deprecated packages don't announce themselves. request has been unmaintained since 2020 and still shows up in fresh projects.

breakcheck doesn't fix any of this for you. It tells you exactly where it is, with a fix for each finding, so the next breakage is a planned migration instead of a fire drill.

Demo

The bundled examples/broken/ project is broken on purpose — one of almost everything:

node bin/breakcheck.js check --path examples/broken

[ERROR] broad-permissions: 'permissions: write-all' grants every permission to the workflow (.github/workflows/ci.yml:5)
       fix: Grant only the permissions each job needs, e.g. 'permissions: { contents: read }'
[ERROR] unpinned-action: Action 'actions/checkout@v4' is pinned to mutable ref 'v4' — tags and branches can be moved (.github/workflows/ci.yml:11)
       fix: Pin the action to a full commit SHA, e.g. 'owner/repo@<40-hex-sha>'
[ERROR] hardcoded-secret: Possible hardcoded AWS access key id in workflow file (.github/workflows/ci.yml:12)
       fix: Move the secret to GitHub Secrets and reference it as ${{ secrets.NAME }}
[ERROR] unpinned-base: Docker base image 'node:latest' uses the mutable ':latest' tag (Dockerfile:1)
       fix: Pin the base image, e.g. 'node:22-alpine'
[ERROR] removed-api: XSLT in the browser is being removed from Chrome and Edge — XSLTProcessor will stop working (app.js:2)
       fix: Move the transform to the server, or pre-render the output at build time
[ERROR] removed-api: The 'imp' module was removed in Python 3.12 (legacy.py:1)
       fix: Use 'importlib' instead
[ERROR] removed-api: The 'imp' module was removed in Python 3.12 (legacy.py:3)
       fix: Use 'importlib' instead
[WARN ] floating-version: Dependency 'foo' uses floating version '*' — installs are not reproducible (package.json:1)
       fix: Pin to an exact version or a caret range, e.g. '^1.2.3'
[WARN ] deprecated-dep: 'moment' is in maintenance mode (no new features) (package.json:1)
       fix: For new code consider day.js, date-fns, or Temporal
[ERROR] deprecated-dep: 'request' is deprecated since 2020 and unmaintained (package.json:1)
       fix: Replace with node:http / undici, axios, or node-fetch
[ERROR] eol-runtime: engines.node '14' targets Node 14, which is end-of-life (Node 16 EOL Sep 2023, Node 14 EOL Apr 2023) (package.json:1)
       fix: Move engines.node to '>=18' (20 LTS recommended) and test on it
[ERROR] eol-runtime: requires-python '>=3.8' allows Python 3.8, which is end-of-life (3.8 EOL Oct 2024) (pyproject.toml:1)
       fix: Raise requires-python to '>=3.9' (3.11+ recommended)
[ERROR] deprecated-dep: 'pycrypto' is dead and unmaintained (last release 2013) (requirements.txt:1)
       fix: Replace with 'pycryptodome'
[WARN ] unpinned-requirement: Requirement 'flask' is not pinned with '==' (requirements.txt:2)
       fix: Pin to an exact version, e.g. 'flask==3.0.0'
Summary: 11 error(s), 3 warning(s), 7 file(s) scanned.
Scope: 7 files scanned (patterns v2026.11, scanned 2026-10-26).

examples/clean/ passes with:

Summary: 0 error(s), 0 warning(s), 6 file(s) scanned.
No known patterns in 6 files (patterns v2026.11, scanned 2026-10-26).

What a clean result means

A clean result means no known patterns were found — not that the project is safe. Four things the scope line is telling you:

• No known patterns, not no problems. The tool only knows the patterns in its ruleset; a clean run says nothing about issues outside that list.
• N = files the tool ran a check on, not every file in the directory. Unscanned file types don't count toward N.
• The patterns version is the ruleset vintage — it changes only when a rule changes, so two runs with the same version checked the same rules.
• The date is the scan date, a point-in-time claim. It does not update when the repo grows, so an old paste does not describe the current repo.

As noted below, the tool scans locally and never phones home, so it can't check live advisories — pair it with your package manager's audit for CVEs.

Behavior change in 0.2.0: docker:// action references used to be silently skipped. They are now checked like Dockerfile base images: no tag or :latest is an error, a major-only tag is a warning, other tags and digests are clean. Every run also prints a scope line after the Summary line (see above).

Install

# needs Node.js 18+
git clone https://github.com/techdevfun/breakcheck.git
cd breakcheck
npm link   # makes `breakcheck` available everywhere

Or just run it without installing:

node bin/breakcheck.js --help

Usage

# Scan a project (exit 1 if any error-level finding)
breakcheck check --path ./my-project

# JSON output for CI / scripts
breakcheck check --path ./my-project --format json

# Also fail on warnings (strict mode)
breakcheck check --path ./my-project --fail-on warn

Option	Default	What it does
--path DIR	(required)	Project directory to scan
--format text|json	text	Output format
--fail-on error|warn	error	Fail when findings reach this level
--help, --version		Show help / version

Exit codes: 0 clean (or only below-threshold findings) · 1 findings at/above --fail-on · 2 bad arguments / unreadable directory.

What it checks

File	Rules
package.json	Deprecated deps (request, node-sass, tslint, babel-eslint, core-js 2.x, …), moment maintenance-mode warning, floating versions (*, latest, >=), engines.node on an EOL Node, missing engines.node
requirements.txt	Deprecated Python packages (pycrypto, nose), unpinned requirements (no ==)
pyproject.toml	requires-python allowing EOL Python, missing requires-python
.github/workflows/*.yml	Actions pinned to a mutable tag/branch instead of a full commit SHA, permissions: write-all, broad contents: write, pull_request_target (runs with secrets — never run untrusted PR code under it), hardcoded token-shaped secrets. Local actions (./.github/actions/...) are repo-local and not flagged. docker:// images: no tag or :latest is an error, a major-only tag is a warning, other tags and digests are clean
Dockerfile	Base image with no tag or :latest, major-only tag (mutable)
Code (.js/.ts/.py)	Removed APIs: browser XSLTProcessor, Python imp, collections.Mapping-style aliases, distutils

The deprecation list is deliberately small: every entry is a removal or deprecation that is public and settled, not a popularity contest. The tool scans locally and never phones home, so it can't check live advisories — pair it with your package manager's audit for CVEs.

In CI

- name: Check for breakage risks
  run: node bin/breakcheck.js check --path . --format text

Warnings don't fail the run by default, so you can adopt it without breaking existing builds. Turn on --fail-on warn once the warnings are down to zero.

Roadmap

• --fix for the safe mechanical fixes (pin :latest → explicit tag is intentionally not auto-fixed — picking the version is a decision).
• SARIF output for GitHub code scanning.
• More removed-API entries, driven by real breakage reports (open an issue when a platform removal bites you).

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.