Blocked esbuild.exe executable breaks Angular projects

🐞 Bug report

The issue originates in esbuild (see: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1561), but since Angular adopted esbuild as part of build system it stopped companies with strict binary execution policy on Windows to continue updating Angular projects.

Command (mark with an x)

• new (as it does installation of dependencies, postinstall fails)
• build
• serve
• test
• e2e
• generate
• add
• update
• lint
• extract-i18n
• run
• config
• help
• version
• doc

Is this a regression?

In some scope, yes. Earlier versions of Angular do not use esbuild and because of that the issue does not exist in Angular workspaces.

Description

On Windows machines with restricted binary execution policy (quite common setup in enterprise companies) execution of esbuild.exe is being blocked. This results in (1) failed postinstall and (2) failure to build projects.

Postinstall failure:

esbuild comes as a transitive dependency from Angular:

Build failure (output is full of identical errors):

Executable is blocked:

🔬 Minimal Reproduction

Ideas to reproduce similar behaviour:

• Block execution of esbuild.exe on Windows (?)
• Corrupt esbuild.exe so that it would fail to run mimicking blocked execution

🌍 Your Environment

$ ng version

     _                      _                 ____ _     ___
    / \   _ __   __ _ _   _| | __ _ _ __     / ___| |   |_ _|
   / △ \ | '_ \ / _` | | | | |/ _` | '__|   | |   | |    | |
  / ___ \| | | | (_| | |_| | | (_| | |      | |___| |___ | |
 /_/   \_\_| |_|\__, |\__,_|_|\__,_|_|       \____|_____|___|
                |___/
    

Angular CLI: 12.2.3
Node: 14.17.0
Package Manager: npm 6.14.13
OS: win32 x64

Angular: 12.2.3
... animations, cdk, cli, common, compiler, compiler-cli, core
... forms, language-service, material, platform-browser
... platform-browser-dynamic, router, upgrade

Package                         Version
---------------------------------------------------------
@angular-devkit/architect       0.1202.3
@angular-devkit/build-angular   12.2.3
@angular-devkit/core            12.2.3
@angular-devkit/schematics      12.2.3
@angular/flex-layout            12.0.0-beta.34
@angular/localize               12.1.1
@schematics/angular             12.1.4
ng-packagr                      12.1.2
rxjs                            6.6.7
typescript                      4.3.5

Anything else relevant?

Ideas how this issue could be solved:

• Angular could provide an option to fallback to esbuild-wasm. Ideally, the fallback should happen only on Windows and other environments could benefit from full potential of esbuild.
• Support esbuild project to code sign executable (More info: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1561). Having code signed executable would provide a way for companies to create execution exception rules for all future versions of esbuild.exe.

[alan-agius4]

As a workaround if you use Yarn, you can use “resolutions”

"resolutions": {
  // Note: this has to match the esbuild version in @angular-devkit/build-angular/package.json
  "esbuild@0.12.18": "npm:esbuild-wasm@0.12.18"
}

[angular-automatic-lock-bot[bot]]

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