How to solve “violate CSP directive: ”default-src 'self'" in Angular 8?

Question

We have an Angular 8 single page web app deployed on the customer server. They set one of the CSP directive to: default-src 'self'. We build the Angular app using ng build --prod like any other Angular applications. After deploying, we get this error:

main-es2015.47b2dcf92b39651610c0.js:1 Refused to apply inline style because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "default-src 'self'". Either the 'unsafe-inline' keyword, a hash ('sha256-47DEQpj8HBSa+/TImW+5JCeuQeRkm5NMpJWZG3hSuFU='), or a nonce ('nonce-...') is required to enable inline execution. Note also that 'style-src' was not explicitly set, so 'default-src' is used as a fallback.

Look into the html code on the browser, I see something like this:

As you can see, Angular actually use tag <style> to serve the css (please correct me if I'm wrong). This violates the CSP directive mentioned in the question.

After searching around, I think Angular/React is quite bad at handling this issue, those frameworks are not built with CSP in mind. You can check out Angular github page, there is an open issue for this. Now I'm searching for a solution to overcome this, of course changing CSP policy is not an option because the customers don't want to.

How can I tell Angular not to use tag <style> in production to serve css? I think to make it works we need to set Angular in a way that it will load the css files, and then use styles in those files instead of injecting <style> into html which causes CSP issue.

Edit 1 : Our project is using scss .

Edit 2 : After searching around, I have found out that Angular will inject your component's styles into the DOM by using <style> element. As shown here:

Now I have an idea, because for each compinent's style will be injeced into the DOM through <style> element, we can prevent this from happening by bundling all component's style .scss file into a single style.scss file. From the image above you can see that we always have an empty <style> element, so if this works, we will endup with only one <style> element and a <link> element that link to our global style scss file. We can have multiple way to remove that empty <style> element before the page got rendered by the browser.

Now I'm stuck at configuring custom webpack to make this happen. We cant use ng eject to get the webpack.config.js file since Angular CLI 6. I've been using Angular CLI 8 so the only way for me to add custom configuration into Webpack is to use custom-webpack npm. I cant find a good config file that has the same output as my desire, please help if you know how to config webpack to bundle all component's styles scss files in Angular into a global scss file.

Answer 1

I think this can be an acceptable answer for my question:

First of all, my recommendation is stay away from using styleUrls . Angular will inject styles of your component into the DOM using <style> element. Secondly, if it's possible, you should know / ask for the CSP policy on the deployment server/environment. What I have been doing to resolve the issue (my project is reletively small with just a couple dozen of components):

1. Copy (one by one) relative link of components, put them into angular.json , in styles attribute. This is because Angular will bundle all styles in this attribute as a single css/scss file. I copy one by one because the css/scss file was designed to work with Angular View Encapsulation in the first place. Gathering all of them into one place might introduct unexpected issue, this will break the UI. Whenever copy a component style and put into styles , I check if the UI breaks because of that. This will help me narrow down the root cause if such issue happens.

2. For each component, after copy its component style file's relative path into styles , I remove styleUrls in @Component . This prevents Angular from injecting <style> into the DOM.

Caveats:

• Gathering all styles into one single file and load them at once might cause performance issue. Luckily my company project is relatively small.
• Now you need to document the new way of making styling work in your project.