Warden

A deterministic security gate for Laravel CI and deployment pipelines.

Introduction

Warden audits locked production dependencies, supply-chain configuration, and high-confidence Laravel production settings without becoming part of the deployed application.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3–8.5
• Laravel 12 or 13
• Composer 2
• npm only when a package-lock.json is present

Installation

Install Warden as a development dependency:

Laravel discovers Warden automatically. If package discovery is disabled, register Dgtlss\Warden\Providers\WardenServiceProvider::class in your application's providers array.

Usage

Run Warden before pruning development dependencies from the production artifact:

Initialize Warden safely and optionally generate a dedicated CI file:

warden:init never overwrites an existing config/warden.php or root GitLab pipeline. --force may replace only Warden-owned generated CI files. Publishing with vendor:publish --tag=warden-config remains available for manual setups.

CI usage

The default command uses the CI profile, audits production dependencies, reports every finding, and fails on low severity or higher:

Common examples:

Machine formats never mix progress or diagnostic prose into stdout. Scanner failures are included in the report and exit with code 2.

Exit codes

Profiles

CI environment variables do not disable production checks. Use --profile=production when the pipeline has loaded the intended deployment configuration.

Built-in audits

• supply-chain: lockfile presence/synchronization, secure Composer repositories, plugin allow-listing, and JavaScript lockfile support
• composer: Composer advisories, malware, and abandoned production packages from composer.lock
• npm: npm advisories from package-lock.json, auto-detected without a flag
• laravel-config: tracked .env detection and production application/session/tooling rules
• platform: offline PHP and Laravel support-window enforcement, including Composer's exact platform target
• source: parser-backed PHP taint analysis, Blade review, and redacted credential detection
• storage: production-only operational warnings; these do not fail the security gate

Yarn, pnpm, and Bun lockfiles are detected but are not yet parsed. Warden reports the limitation so the package-manager-native audit can be added as a separate CI step.

Source security model

Warden parses each selected PHP file once and distinguishes enforcement from review guidance:

• Blocking rules require a high-confidence condition such as request-controlled data reaching a command, raw output, outbound URL, redirect, deserializer, or filesystem sink. Other blocking rules cover interpolated raw SQL, disabled TLS verification, provider-format credentials, weak constant ciphers, and explicit CSRF middleware removal.
• Advisory rules highlight unescaped Blade output, forms without an obvious CSRF directive, mass-assignment disabling, debug calls, sensitive logging, weak contextual hashing/randomness, and secret-like literals.

Credentials are never copied into reports. Warden emits only the provider, location, and a redacted description; the secret contributes only a one-way hash to the stable fingerprint.

Default PHP scan paths are app, bootstrap, config, and routes; Blade templates are read from resources/views. File paths, exclusions, and the 1 MiB file limit are configurable under warden.audits.source. A selected file that cannot be read or parsed makes the scan incomplete and exits 2.

Rule policy

Every configurable rule has a stable ID and a built-in disposition. Override one without suppressing individual occurrences:

Allowed values are enforced, advisory, and off. Unknown rule IDs and invalid values are configuration errors. Advisory findings remain visible in every report but do not affect exit 1; suppressions and baselines still apply to them.

See the complete rule catalogue for stable IDs, default dispositions, and rationale.

Supply-chain review window

Composer packages released within three days produce an advisory. A recent package becomes a blocking critical finding when it is a Composer plugin or registers autoload.files, because it can execute automatically. The window is offline, uses composer.lock timestamps, respects --scope, and is configurable with warden.audits.supply_chain.minimum_release_age_days.

Reviewed suppressions

Suppressions are exact, documented, and expiring. Wildcards are not supported.

An expired or malformed suppression is a configuration error and exits 2.

Baselines

Legacy applications can commit an explicit fingerprint baseline while continuing to fail on new findings:

This creates warden-baseline.json. Baseline generation refuses to write a file if any audit is incomplete.

Reports

Warden supports:

• console: readable terminal report
• json: versioned Warden schema with audits, blocking/advisory counts, findings, ignored findings, errors, and summary; the schema ships at resources/schemas/warden-report-2.0.0.json
• github: GitHub Actions workflow annotations
• gitlab: GitLab dependency scanning report schema 15.2.4
• sarif: SARIF 2.1.0 for GitHub code scanning and compatible platforms
• junit: portable JUnit XML for Jenkins and other CI systems

Advisory findings render as notices in GitHub and skipped tests in JUnit. SARIF and JSON preserve the blocking property.

--output-file=- writes to stdout. Relative file paths are resolved from the Laravel application root.

Notifications

Notifications are opt-in and never affect the audit exit code:

Configure any combination of:

Each channel is dispatched once. Delivery failures are written to stderr after the report is produced.

Custom audits

Custom audits receive the immutable audit context and return a typed result:

Register the class in config/warden.php under custom_audits.

Testing

Changelog

Please see the releases page for a list of changes.

Contributing

Please see UPGRADE.md before changing the dependency constraint.

Security Vulnerabilities

Please report security vulnerabilities privately using GitHub Security Advisories.

License

Warden is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.