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About code scanning with CodeQL

In this article

You can use CodeQL to identify vulnerabilities and errors in your code. The results are shown as code scanning alerts in GitHub.

Code scanning is available for all public repositories, and for private repositories owned by organizations where GitHub Advanced Security is enabled. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

About code scanning with CodeQL

CodeQL is the code analysis engine developed by GitHub to automate security checks. You can analyze your code using CodeQL and display the results as code scanning alerts.

There are two main ways to use CodeQL analysis for code scanning:

About CodeQL

CodeQL treats code like data, allowing you to find potential vulnerabilities in your code with greater confidence than traditional static analyzers.

  1. You generate a CodeQL database to represent your codebase.
  2. Then you run CodeQL queries on that database to identify problems in the codebase.
  3. The query results are shown as code scanning alerts in GitHub when you use CodeQL with code scanning.

CodeQL supports both compiled and interpreted languages, and can find vulnerabilities and errors in code that's written in the supported languages.

  • C/C++
  • C#
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript/TypeScript
  • Python
  • Ruby

Note: CodeQL analysis for Ruby is currently in beta. During the beta, analysis of Ruby will be less comprehensive than CodeQL analysis of other languages.

For more information, see the documentation on the CodeQL website: "Supported languages and frameworks."

About CodeQL queries

GitHub experts, security researchers, and community contributors write and maintain the default CodeQL queries used for code scanning. The queries are regularly updated to improve analysis and reduce any false positive results. The queries are open source, so you can view and contribute to the queries in the github/codeql repository. For more information, see CodeQL on the CodeQL website. You can also write your own queries. For more information, see "About CodeQL queries" in the CodeQL documentation.

You can run additional queries as part of your code scanning analysis. These queries must belong to a published CodeQL query pack (beta) or a QL pack in a repository. CodeQL packs (beta) provide the following benefits over traditional QL packs:

  • When a CodeQL query pack (beta) is published to the GitHub Container registry, all the transitive dependencies required by the queries and a compilation cache are included in the package. This improves performance and ensures that running the queries in the pack gives identical results every time until you upgrade to a new version of the pack or the CLI.
  • QL packs do not include transitive dependencies, so queries in the pack can depend only on the standard libraries (that is, the libraries referenced by an import LANGUAGE statement in your query), or libraries in the same QL pack as the query.

For more information, see "About CodeQL packs" and "About QL packs" in the CodeQL documentation.

Note: The CodeQL package management functionality, including CodeQL packs, is currently in beta and subject to change.