angular / angular/angular-cli

Generate command should respect file name safety conventions.

Open
#25,282 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
area: @angular-devkit/schematics freq1: low severity2: inconvenient type: bug/fix
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
27k
Forks
11.8k
Avg merge
14h 23m
Merged PRs (30d)
162

Description

### Command

generate

### Is this a regression?

- [ ] Yes, this behavior used to work in the previous version

### The previous version in which this bug was not present was

_No response_

### Description

Long story short is that the Angular CLI generate or g command is capable of doing some illegal and difficult to reverse file operations.

Longer version: I was going to create a component this morning to make building PrimeNG p-tables simpler and more dynamic. At the time I started, what I was thinking of was specific to a set of tables I intended to use in an administrative context, so I navigated to something like /src/modules/sales/costing-tool/components/templates and typed "ng g c admin-table". 

Before I hit enter, I thought about it and decided that rather than creating a module and specific use component that I'd rather make a general use component for generating p-tables dynamically & that it belonged in a shared module rather than a feature module. I thought I'd already deleted the CLI command out of the terminal so without looking I typed cd.. and hit enter. Which was the beginning of a 2+ hour headache that ended up costing me 2 days of work and which potentially could've cost me all the work I've done since May 5. 

So the command I effectively entered was "ng g c admin-tablecd..", and what happened is that the CLI was able to somehow dodge the OS level naming safety conventions & it created a folder named admin-tablecd.., which caused there to be an unresolvable reference in my project structure and made it unloadable and unbuildable. And there was nothing I could do to delete the offending folder. I tried deleting it through the UI, using DOS commands, using WSL commands including rmdir with the -rf flag, nothing would get rid of it, even after a reboot. I had just about resolved myself to having to clone my latest remote to a new local repo which would've set me back to the 5th when I tried rmdir with the "\\?\c:\path\to\bad\directory" syntax which finally worked.

I think that optimally the generate command should respect naming safety conventions, or minimally provide a complimentary command to remove generated components.

### Minimal Reproduction

Via the CLI, generate a component with a name that ends in a directory traversal operator, i.e. new-componentcd..

### Exception or Error

```text
The system cannot find the file or directory specified
```

### Your Environment

```text
Angular:

Package Version
------------------------------------------------------
@angular-devkit/architect 0.1502.4
@angular-devkit/core 15.2.4
@angular-devkit/schematics 15.2.4
@schematics/angular 15.2.4
```

### Anything else relevant?

Can't think of anything.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start at the Angular CLI `generate` command entry point and reproduce the reported component name ending in `cd..`. Trace how that name becomes a path, then verify that unsafe names are handled without creating an unresolvable directory; the issue is done when the minimal reproduction no longer produces the problematic path.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
angular, typescript
Domain
cli
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.