I used to treat npm ci as the boring part of a job log, the stretch where you refill your coffee. Lately I read it differently, because that stretch is when a runner pulls code nobody on the team has looked at and runs its install scripts while the job's tokens are still loaded. GitHub's new package firewall is aimed at exactly that stretch.

GitHub put the firewall into public preview on October 20 for all GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers, including Enterprise Cloud with data residency. GitHub's reasoning will sound familiar to anyone who owns a pipeline: agents and CI runners install dependencies to finish a task or a build with no human in the loop, which makes them the easy target for malware that fires at install time.

A gate in the network path

The firewall sits between your endpoints (or your internal registries) and the upstream package repositories.…