Dependency Management: A Guide and 3 Tips to Keep You Sane

Managing dependencies is not for the faint of heart. For a single project, you may be able to keep up with dependencies on your own. For software codebases with hundreds of modules, however, even the most seasoned developer will quickly descend into dependency hell.

Don’t worry: dependency hell has happened to the best of us! There are some things you can do to keep yourself sane and improve application security. Read on to learn more about challenges, best practices, and good strategies for dependency management, and discover our three favorite tips.

Dependency Management Defined

First, let’s define some of the basic terminology.

A software dependency is an external standalone library that can be as small as a single file or as big as multiple files and folders organized into packages to perform a specific task. For example, if you created a messaging app and wanted to encrypt your messages, you could use an external package created by someone else for the encryption. Your messaging app now has a dependency — the encryption package — that it needs to run properly.

There are two types of dependencies:

• Direct dependencies are the libraries referenced directly by your application.
• Transitive dependencies are the libraries your dependencies are calling; on a basic level, they are a dependency of a dependency.

Dependency management is a technique for identifying, resolving, and patching dependencies in your application’s codebase.

A dependency manager is a software module that helps integrate external libraries or packages into your larger application stack.

The Importance of Dependency Management

When it comes to dependency management, open source software has made things more complex. Built on the foundation of sharing and reusing code, open source software now accounts for 60-80 percent of all applications’ code base. Sometimes this reaches 90 percent, which means more dependencies to manage.

So why do you need visibility into your dependencies anyway? Outdated dependencies can impact your software application in a number of ways:

• Security. Some libraries have known vulnerabilities. If you’re not updating these libraries, your application is exposed and you may be passing this risk on to others.
• Performance improvements. If your dependencies are outdated, you may be missing out on the latest enhancements that significantly improve performance or add new functionality.
• Quality assurance. To keep your application running smoothly, you need to prevent problems such as conflicting or circular dependencies as well as keep up to date on libraries that have been end-of-lifed and bug fixes.
• License compliance. With so many dependencies, it can be hard to keep track of all your open source licenses. Many organizations don’t understand that all licenses need to be compatible with each other and that they are bound not just by the licenses of direct dependencies, but also by the licenses of every transitive dependency. By not fully understanding all your dependencies’ licenses, you put your own IP at risk.

Challenges in Dependency Management

Dependency management can be tricky. Perhaps the three most significant problems that you’ll face are:

Conflicting dependencies

Sometimes, more than one software package needs to use the same dependency, but each of them requires a different version of that dependency. The versions may not always be compatible, and the risk exists that when you solve the dependency for one piece of software, you’ll break the compatibility of another.

Versioning issues

Updated versions of existing software and components are intended to improve the performance of that software and fix bugs, so patching software with new versions is important. Versioning also allows development teams to keep track of changes they make to the project code. However, issues can arise when:

• Teams lose track of the most up-to-date versions and install or continue to use out-of-date versions.
• Differing components and dependencies work better with different versions of the same software, creating conflicts and confusion that could create vulnerabilities.
• Malicious actors seek to generate versions that enable them to infiltrate your code base when they are adopted.

It’s therefore essential that every component and dependency gets scanned to ensure that versions used in each particular instance are secure.

Managing Dependencies Across Multiple Environments

Similar to the versioning issue, dependencies can behave differently when used in different environments and when they are put together with other components. Like cogs, they have to fit together properly, otherwise, the whole mechanism doesn’t work. Mismanaged dependencies can therefore disrupt or disable entire projects.? To avoid this, you need to do the following:

• Identify the types of dependencies you’re using or need to use.
• Assess where and how dependencies could affect things.?
• Prioritize those dependencies that pose the most pressing risk to your project.
• Update and remediate the most significant and risky dependencies.
• Regularly review dependencies. Components change and versions are updated all the time. You need to stay on top of them constantly.

Keep reading ?? https://go.mend.io/3ObqfDt