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n1474335 edited this page Sep 16, 2022 · 17 revisions

Installing

CyberChef uses the Grunt build system, so it's very easy to install. You'll need to carry out the following steps to get going:

  1. Install Git
  2. Install Node.js version 18 and npm version 8 (nvm is usually a good way of managing your Node versions)
  3. git clone https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef.git
  4. cd CyberChef
  5. npm install

npm will then install all the dependencies needed to build and run CyberChef.

Consider adding export NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=2048 to your ~/.bashrc file. If you attempt to build a production version of CyberChef, you may get a "JavaScript heap out of memory" error if you do not set this environment variable. You can also run npm run setheapsize to do this but it will not persist between terminal sessions.

Compiling

Note that CyberChef only supports bash-based dev environments, so primarily Linux and Mac. You may be able to get a build working on Windows, but it is not officially supported.

npm has been configured with several scripts to aid in the development process:

npm start

Use this when developing new functionality. It will launch a web server on port 8080 hosting an uncompressed, development version of CyberChef, accessible by browsing to localhost:8080. Whenever a source file is modified, the development version will be rebuilt automatically.

npm run build

When you are ready to create a production build, run this command. It will lint, test, compile and compress all the source files and create a production-ready build in build/prod/.

npm run node

This will package up CyberChef as a NodeJS library. More info on this can be found here: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/wiki/Node-API

npm test

This will run all the pre-configured tests and output the results to stdout.

Repository structure

  • build/
    • prod/ - This folder contains the most recently built production version of CyberChef including the inline version. It is populated by running grunt prod.
  • src/
    • core/ - Core CyberChef files that make up the heart of the application
      • config/ - Files specifying the operation configurations
        • modules/ - Automatically generated module references
      • lib/ - Libraries containing shared code for multiple operations
      • errors/ - Custom error types
      • operations/ - Operation objects
      • vendor/ - Libraries that cannot currently be imported through npm
    • node/ - Wrappers for the NodeJS version of CyberChef
    • web/ - The code which makes up the CyberChef web app
      • css/
        • lib/ - Library CSS and Less files
        • structure/ - Structural styles to lay out the stage
        • themes/ - Look and feel styles
      • html/
        • index.html - The CyberChef page structure
      • static/ - Static files like images
  • test/
    • tests/ - Configuration for tests on operations and recipes
  • .babelrc - Babel transpilation configuration
  • .editorconfig - Text editor conventions stored in a cross-compatible format
  • .travis.yml - Travis CI build process configuration
  • Gruntfile.js - Grunt build process configuration
  • webpack.config.js - Webpack configuration
  • postcss.config.js - PostCSS configuration
  • LICENSE - The Apache 2.0 licence information
  • package.json - npm configuration and a list of all the dependencies
  • README.md - An introduction to CyberChef
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